


may it be fearless

by sunburst



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming of Age, Inspired by The Half of It (2020), M/M, Mutual Pining, cameos from all of seventeen, xu minghao and the mortifying ordeal of being in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 39,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28588887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunburst/pseuds/sunburst
Summary: Mingyu asks Minghao to write love letters to Seokmin on his behalf. Only problem is, Minghao really likes Seokmin, too.
Relationships: Kim Mingyu/Lee Seokmin | DK, Kim Mingyu/Lee Seokmin | DK/Xu Ming Hao | The8, Kim Mingyu/Xu Ming Hao | The8, Lee Seokmin | DK/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 85
Kudos: 161
Collections: Seventeen Rare Pair Fest: 2 Rare 2 Pair





	1. How much I've already lost

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [SVTRarePairFest2](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/SVTRarePairFest2) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> seokhao the half of it au (aka a cyrano au) 
> 
> mingyu is the jock in love with popular boy seokmin but worries he can’t keep up and asks minghao to write letters pretending to be him. shenanigans ensue
> 
> i think a poly 97z ending would be most fun but follow your heart
> 
> -
> 
> writing this fic has been an utter and complete delight. hope you enjoy!! here's a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3neLZofHIKyS90CuWG4NH2?si=LMKHQHUfSe6UdULuizxsBQ) for you!

_Minghao, wait, I’ll try to explain, I said._

_And then of course I couldn’t, although I really was trying, and even though nothing came out of it you looked at me and waited. Sometimes I guess life is as simple as that._

_While we’re here, though, let me try again._

  
  


It unreels again in Minghao’s head like a movie as he skates downhill. 

Two minutes before, up at the top of the hill goddamn Mingyu Kim is running after him like the jilted protagonist in some screwball romcom, flapping his arms and yelling _“Wait,”_ and when Minghao doesn’t wait, he surges forward and tugs on Minghao’s hand and proceeds to pull him right off the skateboard. Practically fucking bowls him over, no warning whatsoever.

Minghao’s board flies off to one side of the road and he sprawls out and sits dazed on the other. He figures he’ll still be picking grass out of his hair by the time he gets home. He could be a real shithead about this. 

But then his board is deposited back at his feet and Mingyu's face shoves itself into his field of vision, high above him like some especially befuddled angel, the sun beaming through his hair. It's so fucking unfair how nice his face is. His face is effortless, and it's obnoxious, and now it's contorted with concern.

Minghao registers that Mingyu is saying “Sorry, sorry, sorry." Mingyu holds a hand out and hoists him up with ease, tries to smooth down his clothes, steps back when he’s shaken off, keeps repeating it. “Sorry sorry sorry.” His hands hovering near Minghao but not touching. Like a very apologetic mime. 

Alright. Fine. It was only a pure-hearted accident, borne out of evident desperation.

“It’s okay,” Minghao mutters, deciding not to be a shithead about it.

Then Mingyu says, “I really really need your help because I don’t know anything about this stuff.” 

It comes out a little too quick, like he’s thinking faster than he can get the words out. He used to be friends with Minghao in elementary school. When he speaks, there are still remnants of his old lisp. A tell for overexcitement. Probably one of the only things about him that hasn’t changed. 

“What stuff,” Minghao says, some of his annoyance seeping into his voice. 

All slouch and averted eyes, Mingyu goes: “So I have this crush on— on Seokmin Lee.”

The upper half of Minghao’s body floods with warmth, as if he is a house and his roof has been blown away by the wind and too much daylight is streaming in.

He only feels safe saying, “Well, what do you want _me_ to do about that?”

“Uh, how do I say this. Well, the thing is, I’m not the best with words, but you’re so good at them, and love is all about effort, right, so I was wondering if you would help me write love letters to Seokmin? Like, I mean, write them pretending to be— well, me?”

Minghao only stares. 

Mingyu looks at him, and then up at the sky. Preparing himself after having read a shitty weather forecast. He shifts back and forth on his heels. He kind of resembles an anxious stray dog. Ready to be humbled, desperate for love. 

Over the years, Minghao has seen enough of Mingyu to know he's always been like this. It could be annoyingly easy to look at him on the surface level and say, Yes of course I’ll help you, you’re so stubborn, you’re so sincere. Sometimes Minghao can recognize it in himself, too. Unfailing honesty. The big difference is that Mingyu exudes it, but Minghao keeps his cards close to his chest and avoids humiliation. 

It would be simple to like Mingyu. Easy to extend him a yes, to not disappoint him when he’s already bared so much of himself. But here are a few key facts Minghao has learned about Mingyu over thirteen years of passive observation, having obviously grown apart from him since elementary school. 

One: Mingyu is a soccer player, and the Squahamish High team is known for historically being complete and utter shit. As in, they haven’t gotten onto the scoreboard in fifteen years. This means Mingyu possesses a lack of fear at coming up short. In translation: he’s stubborn in a bad way. He doesn’t know when to quit. (Quit when you’re ahead, is Minghao’s advice. Don’t make a fool of yourself.)

Two: Mingyu and his family live above their tiny Korean restaurant right across the street from Minghao’s house, and Minghao’s bedroom window faces the back of the restaurant. From brief preludes looking out the window over the years, he’s seen Mingyu sprout up somewhere during middle school, turning into the kind of tall, popular, good-looking athlete straight from a college recruitment brochure. When he smiles it's like a spotlight shines down on him from somewhere far above. It’s conventional and expected that he’s highly sought after. Every time Minghao’s seen him at school in passing, he's either dramatically pushing his hair back from his face or fixing a minute detail in the bathroom mirror. So he's more than a little aware of all the shit about his own appearance. 

Three: Present-day, there is no earthly way the two of them can relate to one other. 

“No,” Minghao tells Mingyu at the top of that hill. 

“What?” Honest surprise telegraphs all across Mingyu’s face, like no one in the entire history of the universe has ever denied him. 

“I’m not going to write love letters pretending to be you.”

Mingyu pauses, his mouth twisting slightly in an oblique sort of way. “Well, can I— can I ask why?”

Minghao’s still out of breath from the shock of being brought to Earth. His words come out like a series of kicks to the sternum. “That kind of thing is supposed to be personal and I don’t know you anymore. Besides, who even writes love letters? This isn’t the nineteenth century. You’re not exactly a pining viscount, or, like, Oscar Wilde, are you.” 

And he ignores the distressed cry of _Please!_ to get back on his skateboard and push himself away.

Hurtling down the hill, Minghao’s periphery fills with evergreens blurring into dark pleasant streaks of emerald, dappled with sunlight that spills through their branches. He can't help but think about the person the letters would have been addressed to. The wind sings in his ears then slaps at his face, chiding him for stepping backward, for not getting his shoes wet.

Avoiding mistakes is self-preservation. Avoiding mistakes is a subtraction of irrationality from the stuff of the soft heart. What’s left? The smart shit, Minghao hopes.

He reaches the level road and his heartbeat is thudding away inside of him despite the negligible effort of a downhill trip. Later at home, he sits next to his mother in the living room.

Turner Classic Movies has an old Cary Grant comedy on, black and white, its audio crackled with age. He tunes it out, half-heartedly pecking at other people’s essays on his ancient hand-me-down Lenovo.

It only takes a few minutes before the soft yellow lights in the living room go out for a few seconds then reluctantly flicker on. “Didn’t you call the power company?” he asks, looking up from his laptop.

“They wouldn’t understand me,” his mother replies easily.

“I mean, did you try?”

 _"Shhh._ I’m watching.”

“I don’t approve of, but I like people who think in terms of ideal conditions,” Cary Grant says in his dumb stuffy voice. “They’re the dreamers, poets. Tragic figures in this world, but interesting.”

“He sounds like you,” his mother says.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Sometimes you’re too prickly, is what it means.”

Minghao stares at her.

I've learned to be a practical person, he thinks. Better than being a tragic figure or a dreamer.

But then he considers all the tragic and stupid dreamers in his own life. Like Mingyu.

He spends the rest of the evening, actually, mostly thinking about Mingyu, as well as all those other tangential things he should be skirting around. 

For example, Seokmin. 

It gets bad enough that he briefly texts Junhui about Mingyu’s proposition. _The guy’s a dumbo,_ Junhui says. Minghao is about to agree when he follows up with, _I mean, for asking you of all people hahaha love you though,_ and then about fifteen different sparkly kaomojis.

Minghao responds with _Who even uses kaomojis anymore_ and also an exclamation point, because, after all, Junhui is right.

If Minghao were in Mingyu's place, he would've mentioned a dumb puppy crush to literally anyone else at their high school. What about Minghao, exactly, gave the impression that he would be willing to write _love letters?_ Amongst the students of Squahamish High Minghao is known for writing AP Lit essays, requests to teachers for recommendation letters, and the odd poetry assignment. He's never written anything for Mingyu before. There's no precedent.

Minghao goes back to his simple boring school words on his laptop. But all the while, his mind keeps looping its endless circular track. Steadily enough that although the kitchen light wavers a few more times, he forgets to actually call the power company.

When he jolts awake in his bed at two in the morning realizing this, he blames both Mingyu Kim and Seokmin Lee. 

Just a little spitefully.

  
  


Squahamish isn’t much. Never has been. It's an in-between town. Like a place you drive through, a place you start to forget even while you're inside of it, unless you've lived in it grudgingly for thirteen years like Minghao has.

But even then, it feels liminal. It's a community of people who swore they only came for a year or two, just to get back on their feet or raise their children in an insulated space, and then never left. It has a gas station, a church, a railroad. Twisted crops of pines and navy mountains stretch into the faraway distance. At the town entrance down on Main Street, where mostly everything half-modern is, a sad worn-down sign says: _It’s Happening In Squahamish!_

For Minghao, the only thing that happens in Squahamish is more of the same shit. Morning in the station manager’s office passes quiet like most other mornings. The beginning of March is rainy season, and winter in the Pacific Northwest is stubborn. Today as the night disappears, the cold remains, the clouds hanging above like silvery brumous paintings. Gathering mass, then stubbornly spreading themselves thin. 

Shivering inside the office, Minghao calls the electricity company and is promptly put on hold. To pass the time, he continues typing up the different varieties of bullshit about Sartre. The steady stream of words is only interrupted once by the blast of a horn at half-past six.

His mother doesn’t believe in using semaphores. “A town like this needs endless upkeep. Once you start, you'll never be able to stop,” she’d said when he asked her about it in freshman year. They both ignored the fact that this was the same philosophy she had used so many years ago when explaining how they should live in Squahamish in the first place, suggesting that if they survived a little bit like ghosts, never fully inhabiting the town, never having potlucks with their neighbors, then it would be easier to leave it behind.

But over a decade later, they're still here. Still in charge of the railway station. And so Minghao has to jog out from the office to signal with his two lamps as the commuter train rushes past, emerald green and whistling.

As he holds the lamps up this morning, he picks out a few sleepy faces resting against the frosty glass, headed somewhere better. Black smoke funnels up and dissipates into nothing as the train chugs on and leaves him and Squahamish behind. 

He heads back across the tracks to his house at seven and finds his mother still asleep in her armchair. He tucks a blanket around her shoulders, then leaves with the printed copies of the essays in his bag and his skateboard under his arm.

The ten-minute ascent towards Squahamish High is one of the best parts of living down by the railroads. Minghao skates down leaf-strewn Main Street, past the dinky 50s style diner with the cute light fixtures, the sole art store in town, the dance studio that shares a wall with a laundromat so with every step you take, you feel the rattling spin of the machines inside your body. Past Main Street he pushes himself up the tree-lined road all the way to the top of the hill, where their high school sits like a particularly disappointing crown jewel.

“Don’t you want to get your license?” his mother asks him sometimes when he is reluctantly shoulder-to-shoulder with her in the kitchen, stabbing holes in chicken pot pie or, rarely, chopping fresh vegetables.

“No,” Minghao responds. “I like the climb.” 

It doesn’t matter if he gets all red-eared and sweaty by the end of it. That’s actually part of the strange appeal. And that morning, it goes by quicker than usual. He keeps his head down, and he kicks, and he moves. Afterward, with his face warming from the inside, there’s nothing in his head as he locks his board on the school rack except the hammering of his own heart. Reminding him: Hey, asshole. Still here.

He’s early, as usual. Morning mist rises from the grass as he walks to the auditorium, and the sluggish sunlight is pale gold through the fog. 

The main task of the day is to avoid Mingyu as resolutely as possible. They don’t share any classes, so it won’t be too hard. Plus, Mingyu’s general height and breadth basically act as an advanced warning system during the day. The guy parts crowds wherever he goes. It’s perfect.

First period is Theater. At the beginning of the semester, it had presented itself as a good chance to take up some form of art again, however negligible. All Minghao has to do during class is paint his backdrop backstage, unmonitored.

His phone keeps playing the electricity company’s orchestral hold music next to him, soft under the spring musical’s cast rehearsing out on the stage. Back here, it’s like he doesn’t even exist. He has nothing to think about and really nothing to feel. It’s funny and quite sad that Squahamish High, much like Squahamish itself, is just a series of these liminal spaces to him. Something to get through.

But then, but then. 

But then Seokmin Lee starts practicing a solo out on the stage, and Minghao forgets to breathe for a second, listening to that effortless voice punching through the fog and making the place real.

Minghao tries to ascribe what it makes him feel. What it is. He can only deal with these things if he makes some sense of them, if he attempts to understand them in his own words. When Seokmin sings, it's like a window opening to admit the moonlight. No, that’s not quite right, it’s like... like the sleigh ride in War and Peace or something, the silver snowflakes floating free of gravity, floating like pinpricks of stars against the endless blue night, the whole world holding its breath, the whole world opening wide, and…

“Hello,” says a tinny voice from his phone.

Minghao breaks out of his daze and scrambles for it. 

“This is Minghao Xu, I was calling on behalf of—”

“Your bill is three months overdue, Mr. Xu. If we don’t get a minimum payment of a hundred dollars your power will terminate tomorrow.”

“Shit,” he mutters, and hangs up.

  
  


Next period, thankfully, is AP Lit. Jostled back and forth in the hallway rush outside the classroom, Minghao surreptitiously distributes three essays from his backpack. 

“What would I do without you, man,” Soonyoung says, grinning wide as a gremlin. He used to dance with Minghao so he has this teasing informality all the time. As if he’s forever saying, I know who you really are. You don’t fool me for a second.

“I think you’d probably get better grades in college next year,” Minghao deadpans. Soonyoung cackles and slaps him on the shoulder and then promptly forgets to open Venmo.

The other two essays are for Vivi and her girlfriend Haseul, who are very cool and very quick with paying him. Polar opposites of Soonyoung basically. But he goes back and asks Soonyoung to look at his Venmo requests quick, it’s kind of an emergency, thank you, and soon he has twenty dollars for each edition. 

Minghao transfers his balance to his bank account. Sixty dollars. Still forty short.

In Lit, their teacher asks them to partner up and discuss the reading of the week.

“Let’s not,” Junhui proposes cheerfully from the desk next to his. “I caught this frog at the bottom of my driveway in the morning. That’s a million times more interesting.”

He’s never asked Minghao to write an essay for him, even though if he asked, Minghao would do it for free. Maybe that’s why. 

“You’re so quiet,” Junhui hedges when he fails to get a laugh at a joke about toads actually just being a folk taxonomy for hipsters and iconoclasts who think the word “frog” is childish. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar. I can tell when you’re being too thoughtful. Your eyes get all—” Junhui makes a face that makes him look like a confused seer. Mystical yet mystified. “You know?”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

“Wanna come over after school and play PUBG or something?”

“I have shit to do.”

“Oh, like what?” 

“I don't know, just— shit.”

“Right. Of course. When you’re done with your I-don't-know-just-shit you should let me know. After I-don't-know-just-shit your immediate next priority is PUBG. Promise?”

Minghao relents, hides his grin behind his notebook. Junhui always knows how to make him surrender into something softer.

“Did you think about the Mingyu thing?”

His smile slides off his face.

“You said it already last night. You know I don’t think about shit like that. At all.”

Honestly. He doesn’t. 

Minghao's priorities before the ever-approaching prospect of graduation have nothing to do with the nebulous idea of romance. They are: Pay off the bills. Do the work at the station manager's office. Get through classes with minimum effort. Decide what to do about this whole college business. 

Important stuff. Real stuff.

So yet another reason for having said no to Mingyu is that Minghao has no psychic space for love. Love, crushes, dating, obsessions— what does any of that matter right now? They’re only in high school, for god’s sake. Seniors, too. He can practically see red expiration dates hovering above each couple macking face in the hallway between classes.

“There’s no way you don’t think about it even a _little_ bit,” Junhui says, his eyes fixed on their TA Wonwoo, scrawling out a Sartre quote on the whiteboard, and Soonyoung, making a show of teasing him about his handwriting. “I mean, seriously. Hormones are a thing and all.”

“I’m sure I’ll have great times in college,” Minghao says dismissively. “Fan-fucking-tastic times. But I have to get there first.”

“Okay,” Junhui says, then leans close on his elbow to whisper, “but this whole thing would be about _Seokmin._ "

“Shut up.” 

He forgets to keep it down. At the front of the room, Wonwoo raises his eyebrows. 

“Decided to join the group discussion today?”

Minghao pretends to be very busy with his notes.

“Pity.” Wonwoo grins, and taps the quote. _I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite._ “Sometimes this guy reminds me of you, you know.” 

He turns back around all self-satisfied. The asshole. Minghao huffs in disbelief and looks over to Junhui to complain and immediately regrets it. Junhui is making a smug little face that suggests he isn’t letting go of any of this— as in, Minghao entering a theoretical entanglement with Mingyu and, more importantly, Seokmin— anytime soon.

Minghao flicks a shred of his eraser at him, and Junhui calls him a child. 

_Junhui!_ Of all people.

  
  
  


Alright. Fine.

So maybe Junhui is onto something. 

Maybe sometimes Minghao feels small and foolish around Seokmin Lee. Maybe deep inside of him somewhere he feels a bit like an elementary school kid with a crush. Maybe when he’s near Seokmin he’s forever caught off-guard by his own capacity to feel a horrible, terrible, inescapable sort of affection. 

Maybe this represents the slightest stumble in his whole distancing plan.

Minghao has known Seokmin for just as long as he’s known Mingyu. Thing is, though, _know_ is a big word. He can’t really classify how he sees Seokmin as _knowing_ him. It’s something like this. 

Every day, Minghao wakes up at five-thirty to assume the position of station manager in the tiny octagonal office out by the railway station next to his house. Minghao is good at being the Squahamish station manager because it demands discipline and good planning. Once every morning, the commuter train comes in. That’s the one he’ll have to board in a month to get to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport if he decides to fly out for college.

If he does, his mother will need to take over the morning duties once more. Letting those reminders of what Minghao has been trying and trying to help her forget come flooding back in.

He’d begun helping her with morning shifts when he started high school, becoming ruler of his own small morning domain, master of a tiny universe. A universe which, by now, feels sometimes like an island, the cries of circling hawks distant and vague. The scattered evergreens shivering in slight breezes, shaking themselves to life. And Minghao, safe and unmoved inside the office. Watching the world separated behind a pane of glass.

It’s a certain kind of loneliness. Like not pulling the curtains shut. Seeing nightfall, the lengthening shadows going indigo. Then sunrise spreading to a tree branch by branch. Looking at the light and yearning for the warmth.

This is the same way Minghao knows Seokmin. Through a window. His self-imposed condensation blurring the world enough that he doesn’t yet feel obligated to push the raw welt of feeling away from himself. 

It’s too easy to fall into feeling like that, because, after all, Seokmin is Seokmin. The sort of person who’ll do anything for you if you only say please. The sort of person who looks at you and you can tell he’s a few breaths away from giving you his entire fucking being. That he’s like this to almost everyone who shows him a little bit of love. 

That he’s kind, and not complicated. 

Having someone like that in your world is rare. Once-in-a-lifetime rare. So it’s excusable that Minghao’s chest feels funny things around him, and it’s perfectly fine that when he hears Seokmin's voice his heart becomes a disobedient winged thing. 

That isn’t really a problem, is it.

  
  
  


It becomes one the next morning.

Because, as if he intrinsically senses that he is at the center of someone’s thoughts, Seokmin has decided to arrive in the auditorium really fucking early. So early, in fact, that he’s second only to Minghao. 

Minghao is painting his drop behind the stage as usual. He’s adding a long haphazard stripe of blue to the night sky when he hears loud footsteps from on the stage. “This is impossible,” an unmistakable voice says, and then there’s a laugh that’s not really a laugh so much as a cry for help.

Evidently, Seokmin is out there trying to practice a difficult piece of choreography. Minghao doesn’t really know the details of the spring musical’s plot and the characters. He only knows about the backdrop he has to paint. It normally isn’t a part of the show requirements, but their stage manager, Jihoon, seems to suspect his background, arts-wise, and wants to go above and beyond. 

Minghao also knows that Seokmin has one of the main roles. Mostly there isn’t much in terms of complicated choreo. There’s just this one part that’s not even very important, no solo or anything. A big group scene. But Seokmin holds himself to impossibly high standards. 

Minghao is familiar with this particular brand of perfectionism. Overly familiar. He keeps painting, ignores the struggle out on the stage. He also ignores any thoughts of the stage itself. The breathing exercises he used to do before a performance. The perfect aloneness of standing in the glare of the muggy spotlight, seeing nothing except the complete darkness beyond and stray motes of dust sent swirling by movement. Moving from each breath to the next. 

How you have to forgive yourself up there because all of it is entirely you. 

Then comes the faraway sound of someone hitting a bad stride and Seokmin’s voice says “I’m a fucking idiot,” and the feeling then is enough to propel Minghao to stand up and walk out to where Seokmin’s still cursing at himself. 

The stage has a specific luminescence to it even though the spotlights are off. Somewhat removed from reality. Seokmin’s silhouette against the empty auditorium seats looks unnaturally tense. 

“Hey,” Minghao says, quiet but not unsure. “Could I help?”

Seokmin whirls. His forehead is damp and his eyes are wide, his high cheekbones splotched with uneven red. Caught off guard, upset in a way that Minghao has never, ever seen before.

It sends Minghao’s brain into overdrive instantly— he shouldn’t have come out here, he shouldn’t have said anything. Seeing Seokmin like this feels wrong, like something outside of Minghao's scope of awareness. It feels too real.

Seokmin asks, his voice wire-tight: “You dance, right?” 

Minghao ignores his hammering pulse, the internal spiral. He knows me? He knows I dance? 

Takes a breath and says, “Yeah.” 

He doesn’t say that he stopped going into the studio on Main Street six months ago after sending his college applications and his video audition to Tisch. As if he was apologizing for doing what he’d done.

Seokmin pushes his hair back from his face. A trickle of sweat drips down his temple and down his high cheekbone like a single frustrated tear. “What kind of dance?” 

“Contemporary, recently. And…and I teach the little kids.”

Finally Seokmin grins.

There he is, the Seokmin Minghao can recognize. Caught in a whole-body smile, his eyes crinkling at the edges and all the tense lines in his body dissipating. 

“Really?”

He sounds much brighter already. Much more like himself. Minghao's heart doesn't slow, only speeds up, like someone has accidentally pressed its accelerator pedal instead of its brake.

“I’ve always wanted to teach kids," Seokmin says lightly. "Were they doing contemporary?"

“You have to start small with them. I used to teach them how to fall without hurting themselves,” Minghao offers. He isn’t sure what he’s expecting. Maybe a laugh at most.

Seokmin takes a step closer, asks, “Can you teach me?”

He isn’t kidding despite his smile. Minghao can tell. 

Later, Minghao might see it again in his head. The same way he unreels moments like this one again and again when he skates down the hill towards home. How he and Seokmin were, for a moment, two characters in a play sharing a scene alone onstage. How it must’ve looked like some kind of an intimate moment. 

But in the present, neither of them are performing, and it’s unnerving. 

“If it helps you,” Minghao says, doing his best not to back away. It’s becoming apparent that the time to escape is long past. He took the first step. He invited this in. Whatever it’ll become, it’s already happening. What are you doing, you’re going to make a fucking idiot of yourself, his brain says. But he forces his body to take over from the words.

He plants his feet and readies himself. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Seokmin step closer, then closer still, copying his position.

Seokmin's breathing has become steady, unhurried. Minghao can almost feel the way he’s concentrating his entire being into a pinpoint of complete focus. All of that, all of him— all on Minghao. 

He tries his best to suppress his thoughts. This is one of the rare moments where you aren’t supposed to think at all, or else you fuck it up. Minghao used to be good at that. 

He closes his eyes and he tries to go back to his inner self. Receding into a summation of movement and breathing. 

“Learning to fall down,” he says into the darkness, “is about getting better at making mistakes.”

The slide to the ground is simple. Like a swan lifting from a lake in reverse. He and Seokmin will become two swans. It’ll be easy. There’s nothing to worry about.

Then he hears something and opens his eyes to see that the auditorium door has swung open. Daylight is cutting into the sleepy shadows as the other students stream in for the beginning of first period, and someone flicks a switch, and the auditorium blinks awake with ugly fluorescence. Whatever he and Seokmin have suspended between them, a quiet ready warmth, like they really have known each other closely for years, remains.

But Minghao straightens. His arms go slack at his sides. He turns to face Seokmin, who is still in position, half-leaning, ready to plummet downward.

“Sorry.” Minghao gestures to the outside world as if that explains anything.

Seokmin straightens, too, mirroring him, arms relaxing at his sides, and shakes his head.

“I figure I wouldn’t be good at it, anyways,” Seokmin says. “Falling down without hurting myself.”

Then he laughs, a sound that falls short. He steps close and touches Minghao’s arm. His palm is warm, like he’s been out in the sun.

“But thank you for thinking of me.”

  
  


At the end of seventh period Minghao marches down the hallway to Mingyu’s locker. 

He’s never been very good at duplicity. In his past when he has tried to wear other masks that don’t quite fit— and dear gods has he tried— they start to chafe and come loose eventually. No matter what, he’s cursed with always revealing his true self in the end.

There are so many internal vows Minghao has made to his mother over the years. All the sons he has wanted to become, has sworn to himself he will learn to become: _I will never think about leaving Squahamish. I will be satisfied with my life here with you. I will be dutiful and I will be happy about it._ A long list of bent promises. 

At his core, Minghao is an honest person. He tries not to be. He fights it. Too honest with yourself, especially in a world where you are destined to never quite get what you want, is one of the worst things you can be.

Minghao wants— No. He needs. He needs to become better at the pretending. No one in the world is completely fulfilled a hundred percent of the time, are they. Deceit is a necessary survival skill, and over the years he has been practicing and practicing. So pretending to be Mingyu will only serve as a natural progression.

But all the same, there’s the center of the matter. 

The center of this is the human heart. The center of this is Seokmin, never duplicitous. 

He’s an actor on stage, but in life it’s like the idea of being anything other than utterly himself has never even entered his mind. In the auditorium he’d said to Minghao: I wouldn’t be good at it, anyways. Falling down without hurting myself.

How can you stop yourself from loving someone like that? Full-body crush, illogical, pried open into softness, overexposed and fuzzy at the edges like a Polaroid? Minghao has been cornered, somehow, into admitting to himself that it's already the kind of thing where he reads a poem and he thinks about Seokmin reading it out loud, he hears love songs and he thinks about Seokmin singing them. Not to be too dramatic, but how fucking terrible is that? It's inescapable. It's like without Minghao's permission the whole world has suddenly become a mazelike gallery of paintings of the same fucking person. No matter where he looks all he sees is Seokmin, Seokmin, Seokmin.

But at least this way— at least this way, it’s a sideways approach, going through Mingyu. There’ll be _something,_ but it’ll be removed from Minghao. He won’t be standing directly in the glare of it. So it’s safe. 

He rounds the hallway corner, his Vans squeaking. A few feet away, Mingyu looks up. Minghao’s own face must look very strange because Mingyu just stands there staring at him, his head cocked slightly to the side, his expression suggesting something like concern.

“I’ll do it,” Minghao says stiffly. “But you’ll have to pay me extra. Fifty dollars.”

Mingyu’s smile takes over his entire face. Almost contagious. Minghao's defenses are, thankfully, very strong.

“I knew it!” He's instantly too loud.

Minghao accidentally makes eye contact with Chan Lee, who he used to dance with and who is also in three different clubs and the prom committee (“Whichever strings a sophomore found and pulled to get on the prom committee, I need to get on that,” Junhui said gravely). Right now Chan's a few feet away down the hall, paused in the middle of pinning up his two-months-early Prom Promo Banners to give Mingyu and Minghao a good long questioning look. 

Mingyu ignores Minghao’s irritable shush and forceful plea to _Keep it down, asshole._ “I knew you’d agree! No one’s that heartless.”

There’s that unwarranted sense of self-worth. It’s like Mingyu thinks he’ll never, ever lose. “What the shit is that supposed to mean?”

Mingyu’s face straightens, but it’s evident he’s trying very hard to keep from smiling. “Nothing. Nothing!”

“Fine. Meet me at the railroads near my house at three. Don’t be late.”

“I have practice,” Mingyu protests mildly. “But I can skip, just this once.”

  
  


By the time Minghao skates to the railroads, the fog has descended early. He squints in surprise when he makes out Mingyu’s tall form dallying near the station manager’s office.

“What’re you doing! Come over here.”

Mingyu startles. He tucks his hands in his pockets as he walks down the railroad, stepping on each crosstie.

“You got here before me,” Minghao says, holding his skateboard close to his body like a shield, unsure why he feels betrayed.

“Well, yeah, I drive.”

“Oh. Right.” 

He catches sight of Mingyu’s pickup haphazardly parked next to the tracks. He's often seen it looming next to his board on the hill, wafting hot air onto his face as it passes him by. Its inside probably smells like sweat and soccer ball rubber.

Something about Mingyu’s face is flinty as he gets closer. It’s clear this is a sign of nerves for the judgment to come. He withdraws a little blue envelope from his pocket and holds it out across the tracks. 

Minghao sighs, puts his board down on the ground, and takes Mingyu's love letter to Seokmin. The handwriting is surprisingly neat, but Mingyu's written everything in pen, and the margins are full of stormcloud scribbles and strikethroughs. Of course he's the kind of person who writes something he regrets and then, instead of using whiteout, just strikes it through. The wrong words are still visible, along with the rash proof of correction. 

“Hey, Seokmin,” Minghao reads, pacing along the dirt. 

Mingyu’s anxious face on the opposite side of the tracks is somehow entirely too close. Minghao holds the paper up to his eyes to avoid thinking about him. The following words of the letter are _I'm super_ _sorry if this comes off creepy,_ but they’re struck through, so he ignores them. 

“I know this is really out of nowhere, but my name is Mingyu and you might know me from the soccer team…or from being the bassist in that band in sixth grade that competed against yours… and flopped really badly at the talent show. And also from being super tall in the hallways. Ha ha ha.”

He pauses for a distinctly unimpressed few seconds and looks up. Mingyu doesn’t react at all. Just keeps waiting. 

“Anyways, I really like your voice and I think you are very cute and kind and fun, and my heart sorta goes _three exclamation points_ when I see you. So respond to this if you wanna hang out. We can make cookies and have a flour fight! Parentheses, ignore this if you don’t I’ll get over it no worries, end parentheses. Heart doodle heart doodle heart doodle smiley face.”

Well. Okay. 

He’s hyper-aware of his every micro-expression being tracked as he folds the letter up into a little square and sighs.

“What is this supposed to be.”

“Is it that bad? It’s not that bad. Right? It’s a letter,” Mingyu says, his mouse pursing. “It’s my letter.” 

“The issue is,” Minghao points out, “this is not a letter. This is a note. It’s… well, it’s word vomit. It’s rambling.”

“It’s earnest. I mean, it’s— it’s honest,” Mingyu says. He almost looks hurt, his eyebrows knitting together. Funny how sensitive he’s being, even though he’s supposed to be well-acquainted with failure. “Isn’t that important? To be honest? Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Do you actually like him?”

 _“Yes!”_ The corners of Mingyu’s mouth stay tucked and he begins to slouch like a wilting flower. “I like him. I really like him.”

“How do you know?”

Mingyu steps up onto the tracks, closing the distance.

“I know because I can’t stop thinking about him. I see him in the hallway and I want to, like, carry his bag for him, or— or make him food so he doesn’t have to eat the cafeteria shit, or—” 

“That just means you’re stubborn and you have a boner for doing things for people. Not that you actually like him.”

“Look,” Mingyu says, frowning. “My point is that I think we would vibe. Seriously. And I know that you…well, you said that you don’t know me anymore. But I do, still. Know you, I mean. I haven’t forgotten you. And I know that you’ve gotten good at this.”

“At what?”

“At…” Mingyu struggles like a person coming up for air. “At… at finding the right words. And the meaning in shit.”

The meaning in what shit, Minghao wants to say. Because he never seems to find the meaning in the shit that matters the most. 

But instead, never one to not have the last word, Minghao raises his eyebrows and says, “Then trust me. I’ll write him a real fucking love letter.”

  
  


Only problem is, as he sits next to his mother that night watching an old French movie about wings and bare-shouldered women (“I mean, seriously, how is this supposed to help you practice English?” “What if I don’t actually want to be practicing English?”) there is the looming fact that he’s never actually written a love letter before. 

Has never received one, either. It’s a bit of an outdated and soapy system of communication.

“Ma, did Dad ever write you love letters?”

His mother snorts. 

“Are you crazy?”

He laughs at her expression. But this means he’s on his own. Everything will need to come from him and only him. 

He presses down on the paper with a pencil, darkening a small spot. He imagines Seokmin. Seokmin’s face, its constant gentleness even in angles created by shadows and stress.

His voice. The bright and sudden way he says everything— like a curtain being flung open. 

But then he only sees Seokmin’s hands under the too-bright auditorium lights, moving with anxious energy. Finally coming to rest on his own arm. _Thank you for thinking of me._ Subdued in a way Minghao hadn’t known he could be.

Onscreen someone murmurs, “Longing…longing for a wave of love to swell up in me.” 

Minghao takes a deep breath then lets the words flood in again.

_Dear Seokmin,_

_I was longing for a wave of love to swell up in me and then I saw you._

_I don’t know you very well yet, but when I think of you I think you seem like someone whose favorite color is yellow. Someone who has to laugh after they cry. Someone who isn’t good at lying. Do you know what I mean?_

A line from his favorite poetry book appears in his train of thought. Compulsively he scribbles it down.

_I give you my blank heart. Please write on it what you wish._

Minghao almost signs it with his own name in a rushed and embarrassing moment of abandonment. Then he remembers.

_\- Mingyu Kim_

On the whole, not terrible. The last line, though. 

He taps his pencil next to Mingyu’s name, deliberating, then makes a split decision. In the interest of tactless sincerity, which is something Mingyu clearly excels at, for better or worse:

_P.S. Some of these aren’t my own words, and I’m sorry. It’s funny for me to admit but it’s hard not to lose my words when I look at you. They don’t quite seem good enough._

  
  
  


“I can’t believe this,” Junhui says the next day at lunch. For all his incredulity he’s grinning like a cat with the cream. “Willingly?”

“Would you please shut up.” Minghao halfheartedly gives him a glare knowing that Junhui, as per usual, won’t take it seriously whatsoever. “I’m making bank. It’s actually a lot of money.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Hao,” Junhui says sagely, sipping from his thermos of hot soup like it’s a mug of coffee. “Tell yourself whatever you’d like to hear, friend. Oh, don’t look now, but he’s coming over.”

Seokmin? “Shit, what?”

“Hey, Minghao!”

Not Seokmin. Mingyu. In a dumb grey varsity jacket, casting a long shadow over their lunch table. The brown paper bag in his hands is practically bursting at the seams. He probably makes his lunch every day. Gourmet restaurant quality or whatever. 

“Oh,” Minghao says with what he hopes is a great amount of dignity. “Why are you here?”

If Mingyu is at all phased he doesn’t show it. He slides his lengthy legs into the table next to Junhui and says hi.

“Hey, Mingyu,” Junhui says, grinning into his thermos. “How goes it?”

“It goes fantastic,” Mingyu says. He looks at Minghao, perking up in his seat. Like a goddamn puppy, Minghao thinks despite himself, then tries to banish the thought. “I have a letter to show you.”

So Seokmin wrote back quickly. Bad sign, maybe?

Minghao tries not to react at all. Although he does imagine Seokmin between classes scribbling on a notebook against the wall, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in utter concentration. His heart gives an awful little twinge. 

“No business talk here. See you after school.” 

He stuffs his sandwich into his mouth and takes off. He doesn’t turn around to check Mingyu’s reaction, but as he stalks away he’s fairly sure Junhui is laughing.

  
  


Mingyu is by the station right after school, pacing back and forth, tensed and amped up. When he sees Minghao he punches his fist up in the air like a John Hughes protagonist, his face kind of terrified. There’s a crumpled piece of paper in his hand. 

“Here it is!”

Minghao sighs. 

“Why don’t you come inside so I can read it in there. Then we can calm down and think of a good response. Yes?”

“You’re letting me sit in the tiny booth? Hell yeah.”

“The station manager’s office,” Minghao corrects. But Mingyu’s already inside, barely fitting.

Junhui would probably compare him to Gandalf in a hobbit house. Plus he’s annoyingly inquisitive with a negative sense of boundaries. He puts the crumpled letter on the desk and slides random drawers open and holds pencils up to the light with unnecessary wonder. Minghao ignores him, stopping any expression of outward annoyance by unfolding Seokmin’s letter and pressing it out flat against the desk.

He imagines Seokmin reading from his own messy script out loud, sitting at the edge of the stage in peach-colored sunrise light, legs swinging back and forth. 

“Dear Mingyu. You’re really sweet.” Seokmin would pause, letting the sentiment linger, his mouth lifting at one edge. “And anyway, it’s okay if you think your own words aren’t good enough! They’re your own words. That’s the important thing, I think. From, Seokmin.”

Then he’d get a slightly conspiratorial look on his face and lean closer. 

“Oh, and P.S., you’re almost totally right! If I don’t laugh after I cry, then things are really bad. And I’m not great at lying, which I think is kind of embarrassing. P.S.S., my favorite color is blue. Not yellow.”

What a funny minute detail. Minghao smiles inadvertently.

“I can’t tell if that's good or bad,” Mingyu says from over his shoulder. Presumably he’s exhausted all of the drawers, having found nothing but old bills. “It’s bad, right? I mean— it’s so short. He’s basically saying we have him all wrong.”

“No.” Minghao digs his teeth into his lip. “It’s good. He’s saying he wants me… you… us to write back. He’s interested in you. He wants to learn more, I think.”

“Okay.” Mingyu straightens, pushing his shoulders back like he’s readying himself for a fight. “Okay! I’ll Venmo you ahead of time. I’ll even pay you extra. Say about, I dunno— seventy-five?”

“For what?”

“Well, I figure you’re going to have to get to know me. So it’s more personal and everything. It’ll take time probably. You can’t just make stuff _up,_ you know.”

“Right,” Minghao mutters. “I guess you’re right.”

“So? This time tomorrow? Hey, I can drive you to school! And then back here, too! It’ll be fun, maybe you can come to practice, or maybe to the restaurant—”

“No,” Minghao snaps. “You’re not going to drive me anywhere.”

He nearly feels bad, the way Mingyu’s face drops then brightens again like he’s trying to cover his disappointment up. But then Mingyu shrugs and says, “Alright. Hey, you’re the writer. It’s up to you. Whatever makes you comfortable.”

Minghao is surprised with how gracefully it’s ultimately taken. He stares at Seokmin’s letter instead of Mingyu’s face. 

He’s not usually one for compromises, but it’s a lot of money.

“Listen. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll give you a list of questions. Have you ever heard about the thirty-six questions that lead to love?”

“No,” Mingyu says, slightly quizzical. “I didn’t really know it could be an exact science like that.”

Minghao huffs a laugh. “Well, it’s not really…I mean, it’s just a getting-to-know-you list.”

“Do I have to answer all thirty-six?”

“Relax. I’ll pick and choose five.”

Mingyu nods. He makes an expansive gesture with his hands and tries to pat Minghao’s shoulder, but Minghao moves out of the way deftly. 

He figures it’s a trap. It’ll lead to a long awkward hug, and then Mingyu’s going to start to mentally overstay his welcome within the halls of Minghao’s heart and he will never have the chance to learn that he can’t always get what he wants. Even if he is Mingyu Kim.

But Mingyu takes it in his stride, says, undeterred and patient, “Hey, thanks for this. I mean it.”

“You’re the one paying me.”

It comes out sounding almost defensive, even to Minghao’s own ears.

  
  


He slips his list of five questions into Mingyu’s locker the next day at lunch. Tuesdays and Thursdays Junhui has wushu club, so instead of sitting with Soonyoung or something and being talked at enthusiastically for half an hour, Minghao walks across the quad to the auditorium. 

Backstage smells like drying paint, oddly comforting. He flips through his favorite poetry book with one hand and takes bites out of another mysterious cafeteria sandwich with the other. It’s second-nature to disengage, drop away from reality by putting himself behind a window of his choice. Sometimes it’s the only thing that he really looks forward to. Some sort of remove from immediate reality.

The poem Minghao is reading has this line that goes, _Then, and now, the wind_ _in the trees makes the sound of the turning pages of our nights and days, the shadows of birds intermittent._ He tries to imagine the breathing of the breeze, rustling through all the evergreens in Squahamish that he overlooks daily. Why does he always seem to be unable to look at what's right in front of him? He's starting to see hosts of glossy white birds flying up from the trees, streaking into the sapphire sky, and then the door to the auditorium creaks open and his imaginary Squahamish dissipates and he's backstage in the school auditorium reading a book instead of sitting in the cafeteria like a normal person. 

Whoever the other person is, they're far away enough that their presence doesn't feel like a real intrusion. But then there are loud footsteps and a sudden clatter and the mason jar he uses to store his brushes goes rattling onto the floor and someone is almost tripping over him where he's sitting on the ground. 

Minghao drops his book in shock and looks up to snap at whoever it is. The words die in his mouth when he finds Seokmin, comically horrified, eyes big as marbles. 

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have even come backstage, it’s just I wanted to—” 

“—it’s okay, it’s okay!”

“I’m so sorry,” Seokmin repeats, already down on his knees, helping gather loose paintbrushes, his shoulders kind of bunched up near his ears. He laughs a little in apparent mortification. “I shouldn't have—” 

“No, don’t worry about it. It’s okay.”

Seokmin picks the book up as if it’s a glass object and holds it out to Minghao with both hands. He has this tight close-mouthed smile that is difficult to interpret. A small dimple pokes into his chin. The tips of his ears are pink, Minghao notices distantly.

Their fingers brush as Minghao takes the book. He curls it close to his chest to reassure himself he’s not having an out-of-body experience. His own ears are burning, too. He can feel it. They must be bright red. Humiliating. 

Seokmin looks like he wants to say something. So Minghao waits.

“Is that a novel?” he asks eventually. Hushed like he’s in a sacred place, the quietest Minghao has ever heard him be.

Minghao's so much at a loss for words that he has to look down at the cover to even remember. 

“Oh, it’s a poetry book. By Li-Young Lee.”

“The cover is beautiful,” Seokmin says, suddenly, in that light wondrous voice he sometimes spontaneously bursts into. Minghao holds it out to let him touch the cover. His long fingers brush the painted feathers of the white wings.

“I used to have this recurring dream,” Seokmin says. 

“What’s the dream?”

His hand leaves the cover and rests on the ground next to Minghao’s. It starts to drum a steady beat. 

“I’m standing in the middle of the stage panicking because I’ve forgotten my lines,” he explains. “I’ve said a word, and I just can’t remember which one comes next. And everyone’s staring at me and starting to talk, and I open my mouth but for once in my life nothing comes out. And then suddenly I remember what I wanted to say but I don’t even have to say it, because I’m lifting off the ground and up towards the roof. Because I’ve grown wings and I’m flying away and leaving it all behind.”

In its incessant motion, his hand brushes Minghao’s.

“I wonder what that could mean,” he says, his brow creasing slightly. Seokmin wears his heart on his face. He is so easily vulnerable. It’s something to envy. 

But then he recedes, looks at the ground instead of at Minghao. His hands shies away coltishly. He laughs and it sounds self-conscious.

“It’s a nice dream,” Minghao says softly, desperate to reassure. 

“Let me, um—” Seokmin gets to his feet in a single rushed movement. Minghao has to lean backward to look up at him. “I’ll leave you alone. I’m so sorry for— for this.”

“It’s alright, you had no idea that I would… Well, sometimes I read here when it’s empty. I guess I enjoy it back here. In the quiet?”

Seokmin pauses on his way out, half-obscured in shadow.

“Yes, I know!” he says, scrunching his eyebrows together slightly. “I know.”

  
  


_Minghao,_

_Why am I so— what’s the word? Oblivious?_

_No. That’s not what I mean, either. I’m always searching for the right words to say even though I know I’ll end up with too many of them in the end._

_I remember you told me that you’re trying to get better at making mistakes. I can’t imagine being like you. I mean, so aware of myself! The way I am, I make mistakes and don’t even notice until it’s too late and then I'm afraid all over again._

_I think that’s a weakness of mine, not a strength. I’m always up to the surface. I’m like a pot boiling over. I never notice the important things when I need to._ _But you do. Everything you say is like a new way of seeing the world. Everything you say feels so important._

  
  
  


Questions to Get to Know Mingyu Kim:

1\. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

_Someday, like much much later, I kind of want to go to culinary school. I guess I don’t actually want to be famous for cooking, but I want to get really really good at it. Like, expert level. I guess that’s my Big Dream or something. Funny I’m telling you, cause I don’t even think I’ve had the chance to tell my mom about it._

That night, Minghao gives up on his AP Calc homework and pulls his curtains back. Mingyu appears around ten, wearing a black apron and dragging big trash bags behind him.

He goes back inside, then returns with a paper plate and sits down on the pavement with a pair of metal chopsticks. He proceeds to eat a fist-sized nest of japchae seemingly all at once. Under the amber streetlamps, chewing on his ridiculous mouthful, he looks tired but permanently content. At some point his mangy white dog comes stumbling out and he takes a break from inhaling food to coo loudly at it in Korean. Minghao understands enough to know Mingyu is calling the dog his baby. 

It’s nauseating. He closes his curtain to keep from smiling.

2\. What do you value most in a friendship?

_The best friendships are the ones where you’re never embarrassed even if you do a lot of embarrassing shit._

“Mingyu’s club meets next door to ours, you know,” Junhui says on Monday at lunch.

“What club?”

“Cross-stitching. He’s the president.”

“Fuck off,” Minghao says, startled into a laugh.

“I’m not kidding!” 

The next day he shows up at wushu club to help Junhui push all the chairs to one side then hovers out in the hallway. When he peers through the window in the door of the classroom next to theirs, sure enough there’s Mingyu sitting near the front.

He's looping a red string around a thin needle, a sliver of almost-nothing in his left hand. He carefully pushes its point into the smiling curve of his stitches. It’s beginning to look like an apple. He glances up and notices Minghao looking through the window.

Minghao jerks away, his face burning at being seen. Junhui catches the whole thing and, from the looks of it, spends the rest of lunch trying his very very best not to laugh, generously trying to help preserve a modicum of Minghao’s dignity.

3\. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

_Never! I tried to, once. But then when I said what I practiced, it came out wrong, and I realized maybe it wasn’t actually what I had really wanted to say._

_I think that’s important. Saying what you mean, even if you don’t know what that is before you say it._

Minghao starts to think about writing the second letter at his desk, tapping his pencil on the edge of the drawer. There are two acceptance letters inside his desk. One to U Dub, one to Tisch for contemporary dance. 

One tying him home, one cutting him loose.

The day he’d gotten the letters had been a good one. About four weeks ago now. 

He’d cooked dinner with his mother, one-skillet stir fry. It had been snowing outside, and they turned the heater on, even though it rattled with age and sometimes gave up halfway through the hour. So they also put their thick woolen socks on, and his mother made him wear the pom-pom beanie he now deemed much too embarrassing to wear to school even in the cold.

He played music on his phone while they worked in the kitchen, something swingy that they both liked. His mother surprised him by doing a curtsy and sticking her hand out and they danced a mockery of a silly waltz where she tried to twirl him around and kept exclaiming about how he was so much taller than her now and she needed to start wearing high heels to regain any semblance of power in the household, seriously, don’t laugh!

Later, he went to check the mail. He came back and sat in his armchair next to hers with the two thick envelopes hidden behind his laptop screen, his stomach feeling like a washing machine of guilt and happiness he didn’t want. 

Turner Classic Movies was playing Paris, Texas. The NYU seal looked black in the dim light emanating from the screen. 

“Watch. This is the best part,” his mother said, her voice gentle enough that it blended into Harry Dean Stanton’s saying, “She told him that she dreamed about escaping. That was all she dreamed about. Escape…” 

Minghao asked, “Why is that your favorite part?”

His mother only looked at the screen. Eventually said, “Don’t we all feel that way?”

And Minghao wanted to insist: _I don’t, but I still feel bad when I think about leaving,_ or at least, _I'm sorry._

But instead, all he could say was, “I guess so.”

4\. Complete this sentence: “My idea of the perfect day is...”

_When I’m satisfied with the smallest things. Probably I would make food for someone I love and sit across from them at the table, and I’d watch them eat, and I’d be so happy._

Okay. So Minghao did the first letter all wrong. 

Because Mingyu isn’t him. Mingyu isn’t careful. He isn’t reserved. His idea of knowing someone is an unashamed peeling back of the bandaid. He believes in rawness, in scabs half-healed. He makes messes and then cleans them up. The trying is essential. Like: it doesn’t matter if what you say makes sense. It only matters that you say it and you mean it.

This is a little fucking terrifying. Trying to have your defenses up while being around Mingyu is like being a buried thing around an especially enthusiastic Labrador. Eventually, you’ll be unearthed.

“You have to come over for dinner sometime,” Mingyu begs at lunch. “It’s right there. Honestly, I don’t know why you’re like this. My dad really wants to see you. He says the last time you came over you had your hair bleached. That was _ages_ ago, dude.”

Minghao doesn't respond.

“I’ll make extra food for you! Just tell me what you want and it’ll be there.”

See: the Labrador thing. 

He tries to prolong his answer, but Junhui is giving him a Look. He sighs into his brown paper bag. 

“Sometime next week,” he mutters. “Just make me whatever you’re having.”

“Okay.” Mingyu grins like a goddamn fool. “Cool.”

  
5\. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

_You and I: we’re both perfectionists. We both like movies! At least I think you like movies because one time your window was open and I saw your Eternal Sunshine poster. And last but not least, we both help our family out a shit ton._

_See. Even if you don’t think so, we have so much in common._

This one gives Minghao pause. 

He’d meant for Mingyu to answer it with Seokmin in mind. Only Mingyu had filled it out thinking of him, instead.

This makes him feel all kinds of strange things. There’s a parallel being drawn between the two of them that really doesn't exist.

“You’re wrong,” he tells the piece of paper. “You don’t know me at all, do you.” 

Of course Mingyu helps his parents out at the restaurant with one hundred percent of himself, because that is simply who he is. 

He would never watch from behind a window longing for the commuter train to carry him away into the blue beyond. He would never be Minghao.

  
  
  


“Letter number two. Ready to go.”

Mingyu’s trying and failing to put on this slightly disaffected air because they’re at soccer practice and he has to look good in front of his jock friends. “What’s in it,” he asks, doing a quad stretch and nearly losing his balance.

Minghao is in disbelief at his own patience and saintly forgiveness. He’d asked to meet Mingyu after school but had been told there couldn’t be another skipped practice, so he very generously offered to wait pitchside until a break came. 

But the breaks seemed always just out of sight. And Mingyu kept gesturing to where Minghao was sitting on the bleacher, signaling that he’d be right over in two minutes every five minutes as if he could sense Minghao’s patience running threadbare. When a lull finally arrived, Mingyu loped over to the bleachers at the slowest possible pace before embarking on a series of dramatic stretches. 

Now, he releases his foot from his tenuous grip and stands at an oblique angle, taking long dramatic sips of his water. He fans himself with his own jersey, flashes his abs occasionally. You know, like a douchebag.

“It has some details about what I’ve learned in the past few days,” Minghao says.

“And what’s that?”

“I think you know already. You’re a normal guy with interesting hobbies. You’re nice, and you’re honest. You’re kind of…generally content, because you’re good at things. But you’re also always working. I mean, on yourself and on others.”

“Generally content,” is what Mingyu chooses to repeat, frowning. 

He takes the envelope from Minghao and looks down at it as if it’s emanating a stink.

“What’s that look.”

“Nothing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being generally content. It just means you know how to feel fulfilled. A relationship would just be something on top of life. It wouldn’t be your end all be all.”

“Okay, Plato,” Mingyu says, and sort of rolls his eyes as he tucks the letter into his bag. “Can’t I just— I don’t know, ask him to hang out with me?”

“Ask him to _hang out?"_ Unbelievable. “Why did you want me to write him love letters then? Why the whole song and dance?”

“I didn’t know this would be, like, a personal attack?” Mingyu’s face is all tight, like he ate something sweet but it turned out to be really fucking sour on the inside. 

“How is this a personal attack—”

“I thought you’d say something really deep and it would, I don’t know, get him interested in me. He’s so popular. He’s like this—” Mingyu makes a frustrated gesture with his hand, a quick shimmer. “This bright star. You know? He’s always so bright. I don’t know how to get him to look at me. I want to get past it and to the part where we argue over dumb stuff and hold hands and shit. But I’m running out of time.”

Minghao glances around the pitch. No one’s nearby except Hansol, busy on his phone, totally in his own world. 

“Okay. Look at it this way,” he says, stepping closer. 

Mingyu shouldn’t think about Seokmin like that, because Seokmin is just like both of them. Seokmin is just a regular person.

But…wait. Minghao’s own heart has inconceivably tripped ahead of him. Because he doesn’t even fully believe his own planned words. Seokmin represents so much more. Something a little terrifying. Something Minghao’s always stepping backwards from.

He ends up saying, slightly too sharp, “If this letter doesn’t work, then we’re over.”

Mingyu’s mouth purses. His normally easygoing aura goes cold. Off-putting. 

“Alright. I guess you decided you aren’t coming over for dinner anytime then?”

Shit. Minghao has totally forgotten about that. Or maybe he’s been trying to forget intentionally. When he doesn’t respond, Mingyu squares his shoulders and steps back.

“Can you at least just give me your number? Then you won’t have to talk to me directly.”

Minghao is too taken aback to tackle the implication. He punches his phone number into the proffered contact list. 

Mingyu gives it a once-over, his tense face tightening even more. He sweeps his hair back from his forehead like it’s an essential and very bitchy part of his thought process. Then he nods and turns his back. 

Minghao watches him for a while as he runs down the field, barking instructions to his teammates. This is a very new side to him. Not at all like the previously easily satisfied, eager-to-please Mingyu. This Mingyu doesn’t hide any moods or pull his punches. He can turn stormy easy as the flip of a switch. 

Minghao sees it now— how wrong he’s been about Mingyu from the start. 

He thinks about it as he skates home under the gathering grey clouds. He is learning that Mingyu is a perfectionist, just like himself. Really Mingyu is pretty sensitive to criticism. He doesn’t want to fail despite all the risks he’s willing to take. 

He always wants to be the best version of himself. He always wants to do the work.

But sometimes that isn’t nearly enough, is it.

  
  
Next Monday in the cafeteria Mingyu is three tables over cracking up at a sight gag Wonwoo is doing with a banana. He catches sight of Minghao in the middle of it and his mouth snaps shut and he gets this odd look in his eyes.

Minghao spends the whole day wondering what Mingyu is thinking. He doesn't have to think long, because at the end of the day, he gets three short texts from a new number. 

_I have practice. Text me what u think. If u want._

Even through the screen, he can tell how much Mingyu is holding back. Editing himself into terseness. He's about to text back when he finds Seokmin’s second letter lying at the bottom of his locker. He keeps a hand tucked in the pocket of his denim jacket all the way to the bottom of the hill, feeling the paper rustle like a live bird.

He goes into the station manager’s office to read it. When he unfolds the lined notebook page there’s this unaccountable nervousness in his stomach. It’s taken a whole day for Seokmin to write back, and the result looks much longer. This makes sense, because what he’s responding to contained more than a little of Mingyu’s characteristic wordiness. 

In the process of writing the second letter, Minghao had actually even decided to add in some lines about Seokmin and Mingyu’s middle school history. The talent show thing or whatever. It was kind of twee and sounded like something Seokmin would laugh at if he remembered it. 

But then, Minghao forced himself to get honest. Deadly-honest. Mingyu-honest. Even though he had, in reality, been writing about himself. Was that another mask he was putting on, writing about himself under Mingyu’s name? Or was it the start of an unravelling?

Either way, he had ended the letter after opening his desk drawer and staring down at his two acceptance letters for a few long minutes. 

_The truth is,_ he had written, his hand going oddly shaky, like he was at goddamn confession or something, _I may seem fulfilled if I don’t think too hard, but there’s something missing here. There’s something missing from inside of me. I don’t know what it is. I just know that I feel its absence and it unsettles me, so I try not to think about it._

_I guess I figured that I could ignore it, but I can’t. And I thought talking to you would help somehow. You’re always just you, even when you’re on a stage. You’re never afraid of feeling things head-on._

Delving into the response to such an open pathetic plea requires space. Space to breathe, space to feel. 

Minghao leaves the pressing stillness of the office and paces along the railroad as he reads Seokmin’s letter. Sometimes he looks up at the sky and the tops of the trees, taking shallow breaths. Taking it all in.

_Dear Mingyu,_

_I get what you mean about feeling like you’re missing something, even if you feel satisfied when you’re not thinking too hard. And I didn’t say this before, but since you mentioned it this time, I actually do remember you from our middle school talent show!_

_The funny thing is that I don’t really remember winning. I do remember that my voice cracked once in the middle of our set, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. And now it’s all I can remember._

_It’s like sometimes things are so easy for me, but then I get tripped up on my own feet and end up falling and then instead of getting up and running again I lay there thinking and thinking. Isn’t that stupid??_

_I thought it was really brave of you to write me a letter the first time, and also for you to keep trying like this. I mean, you’re really putting yourself out there. I wish I could be like that, because always being myself is a problem sometimes. I think I have a long way to go._

_From,_

_Seokmin_

The bottom of the paper is ripped, like a critical piece of it— another P.S., maybe— has been torn out. Minghao traces its jagged edge with his thumb. 

Then, with no small amount of hesitation, he calls Mingyu.

“Hi.”

“It’s Minghao,” he says uselessly.

“I know.” Mingyu’s voice is clipped. 

He kicks at a rock and watches it skitter away. “So I read the letter.”

“And?”

“And I’m…well, I mean, it’s good. I don’t know what you were so worried about. It sounds like he really is interested.”

“Yeah?” Mingyu’s voice starts to come alive.

“Yes.” He keeps pacing, unsure why it feels like he’s being tested. “I told you. Just you is good enough.”

“You didn’t. But okay.” Snippy again. Jesus. Alright.

“Are you at the restaurant?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m coming over,” Minghao says, and hangs up before he can hear the reaction.

  
  
  


The restaurant is empty in the afternoon hush. Minghao waits out at the back, tucking his hands into his warm turquoise coat. He digs into the dew-damp ground with his Timbs. It smells like last night’s rain. Spring has begun, soggy and reluctant. 

If he turns around, he can see the window to his own bedroom. The curtains are a square of solid black inside the cheerful yellow of the house.

He sighs, wonders why he’s even bothering. He’s about to leave for home when Mingyu exits the restaurant, unhurried and deliberate. 

Mingyu folds his arms over his apron, letting the door swing shut behind him. “I was helping with prep.”

“Don’t you have practice?”

“I have practice late on Mondays.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

Mingyu shrugs, his eyebrows arching as if to say, Well, maybe you should’ve asked. Maybe you should’ve just said something.

If only it was that easy.

Minghao stares at the black pocket on the apron instead of the face. 

“Can I come inside?” 

A long-suffering sigh, and then the door is held open for him. 

It’s an overcast day and there’s not much daylight shining through to the short tables inside. Things are mostly greenish and stagnant. Minghao is dispassionately led into the tiny back kitchen, where Mingyu resumes chopping green onions. Or maybe they’re leeks; Minghao has never really cared enough to learn the difference. 

The smell is like fresh grass. Mingyu’s nose wrinkles slightly as he works, as if he’s trying to keep his eyes from watering. Silent except for the muted thunk, thunk, thunk of his knife. 

Although normally he revels in awkward silences Minghao feels compelled to say something. This, he realizes, might be how Mingyu feels around him.

“What’s your favorite thing you’ve made here,” Minghao says, then immediately hates his own uncertain voice. He’s never been any good at small talk. It sounds useless when it comes from others and doubly so when it comes from himself.

Mingyu looks up from the cutting board, seems almost bemused. 

“Why are you asking?”

Minghao shrugs. 

“Is this you planning for the next letter or something? Are you doing, like, primary source research?”

“No. What? No, I’m just asking.”

Thunk. Thunk. Mingyu goes back to concentrating on his chopping like his vegetables might grow legs and run away if he doesn’t. 

“Sorry.” Minghao practically spits the words out. “I’m sorry. For whatever I did. I didn’t mean to. It’s… it’s difficult for me around someone like you.”

“If I have to commit to something, I make sure I commit to it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mingyu doesn’t look up, but he says to the cutting board, “I guess I just thought that we were going to be friends again.”

Thunk. Thunk.

If he could, Minghao would say, Sorry you misinterpreted the situation this fucking badly, and then he would turn around and leave. 

But his feet are like stones anchoring him to the kitchen tile. Twice as heavy as the shit settling in his throat. 

There’s a picture in Minghao’s living room, next to a Polaroid of his father at Marymere Falls. It’s been there for so long that, just like looking at the photograph of his father, walking past it feels like a forgettable part of his daily existence. Like finding his mother asleep in front of the television in the early morning, or skating up the hill to school alone. A nothing-feeling.

In the photo, Minghao and Mingyu are standing in an endless field of wheat. They are in elementary school on a field trip. Mingyu is the same height as him and they’re wearing twin puffer coats in different colors— Minghao in green, Mingyu in bright purple. They’re holding hands. If you stop to look, you see that Minghao is frowning deeply at the camera and Mingyu is staring at him with his little eyebrows knit together in a hilarious mixture of concern and fondness. 

Minghao doesn’t remember where exactly they’d gone for the trip. He doesn’t remember much at all from those years, really. Only that he had been homesick and lonely and suffocated all at once, and somewhere in there, like a brief flash of a comet, there was Mingyu. 

Minghao can’t even remember why they’d grown apart. They just had. And he’d thought it’d happened early enough in their lives that it hadn’t made much of an impression on either of them. 

But of course they must’ve once shared ridiculous dreams of the future, absorbed each others’ habits. They must’ve once known each other the way only children can. Without fear, without inhibition.

Staring at the ceaseless motions of Mingyu’s hand, Minghao thinks about that day from the first letter. How Mingyu had been the one to step up from the ground and onto the railroad, bringing them one step closer to each other.

“I can try,” Minghao says, hesitant and soft. “We can try.”

The thunk of the knife against the cutting board pauses for the briefest of seconds. Then it resumes. 

“Have you heard of soondubu jjigae?”

“Tofu stew," Minghao says, his voice rising in relief. "Right?”

“Out of all the things I’ve learned to make here, that’s my favorite,” Mingyu says, still refusing to look up. “You whisk gochujang, mirin, garlic, and soy sauce. And then you combine it with anchovy stock in a saucepan, add your mushrooms, tofu, and onions. Gochugang is the secret key. It’s a complicated flavor. It’s bold, I guess. I don't know.”

He looks up at Minghao. His face has softened. 

“Okay. I’ll try it someday,” Minghao says, hoping it sounds like he means it.

The corners of Mingyu’s eyes curve up a little, threatening a smile.

Before the moment slips, Minghao captures it. “I wanted to ask you about Seokmin’s letter. Was there something else? At the end of it?”

Mingyu clearly finds this to be an unexpected question. He puts the knife down and shifts on his heels. “Uh, yeah. Well, he gave me his number.”

Shit. 

“Oh. So does that mean…”

“I think whatever you put in that letter actually meant a lot to him. Do you think we should keep writing them?”

They stare at each other across the space of the kitchen.

“Yes,” Minghao says. “Yes, actually, I think we should.” 

“Really?”

“I mean…isn’t that what you think loving him is? How much effort we’re putting into it?”

He feels a strange and sudden relief when Mingyu breaks into a smile.

  
  
  


_Dear Seokmin,_

_I gave up painting for fun a while ago, but I had this art teacher once who told me the only difference between a good painting and a great painting is five strokes. The five bravest strokes._

_I think you’re a brave person. All of us are brave in different ways, I guess. It’s brave to smile. To want something. To make a friend. To wake up every morning. It’s brave to live in this world._

_From,_

_Mingyu_

  
  


_Dear Mingyu,_

_Why did you give up painting?_

_From,_

_Seokmin_

  
  


_Dear Seokmin,_

_I guess I thought there were more important things to do._

_Dear Seokmin,_

_It doesn’t matter._

_Dear Seokmin,_

_When I painted it was like the only thing I had control over. When I painted it was like letting pieces of myself finally finally come loose. When I painted it was like dancing, and it was selfish, and_

_Dear Seokmin,_

_It seemed like a silly thing to want so badly._


	2. How much I've lived

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for depiction of underage drinking

_Minghao,_

_Maybe Mingyu is right. He told me the other day that learning how to love someone is climbing a hill, and when you’ve finally made it up to the top, you’ll see everything spreading beneath you and it’ll all begin to make sense. He figures_ _you’ve never minded a climb. It’s just that you can't imagine that anyone would want to be next to you, or even waiting for you at the top._

_When I heard that it made me so sad. Sometimes you make me so sad. Do you know that you don’t have to do it alone?_

  
  
  


Wednesday morning, his response letter to Seokmin unsent, Minghao pauses with one foot backstage. 

If he freezes like a statue, he thinks wildly, then nothing will happen at all. His presence will remain undiscovered. He will be invisible. 

Seokmin is kneeling in the shadows next to the almost-finished night sky backdrop, humming. It’s the first time he’s been here since that lunchtime a week ago.

Like he has a sixth sense, he looks up and finds Minghao.

“It’s you,” he says, wide-eyed.

“Were you expecting anyone else?” But it comes out unsure. Minghao slides his bag off his shoulder and tries to regain a confident air of detachment. “Are you here early to practice the choreo again?”

“I think I have it down by now, actually,” Seokmin says, smiling. “Remember you tried to teach me that thing about getting better at making mistakes?”

“But we didn’t even—”

Seokmin leans back and clutches his heart in exaggerated offense. “I have listening comprehension skills, no demonstration necessary! What’s the implication here, huh?”

“I didn’t mean anything,” Minghao says too hastily, but Seokmin is already laughing.

“I’m kidding.” He pats the ground, and it feels easy to put one step in front of the other and sit next to him. Like kids at rug time during kindergarten, only there’s no teacher. There’s just the two of them. Seokmin leaning back on his elbows, open like the sun. Minghao putting on his disaffected face.

“Do you have your, um, book with you? The wings one?”

“Yeah, I do.” 

“I was wondering if you could read some of it out loud?” 

Out loud? “Why?”

A tiny smile on Seokmin’s face. Almost-embarrassment. 

“I don’t know. I keep thinking about the cover. And I like hearing people tell stories more than I like reading. I heard that listening to someone smarter than you is better than reading it yourself.”

“That doesn’t sound entirely true.”

“Or maybe I just want to hear your voice,” Seokmin says, then laughs as if he’s joking. 

Who is Minghao to resist that laugh? That laugh and its face, so extraordinarily expressive, trying and failing to hide something Minghao still can't quite get a good grasp on?

And anyways back here he himself is half-hidden. Easy obscurity. “Alright.” 

“Really?” There's a disbelief in Seokmin’s voice as if he’s surprised that Minghao in particular would humor him. 

Emboldened, Minghao takes the book out of his backpack and opens it to the bookmark. “Morning is greater with its firstborn light and birdsong,” he begins. “Noon is taller, though, a moment’s realm. Evening is ancient and immense, and night’s storied house more huge.” 

He glances up self-consciously. Seokmin’s eyes are closed, like he’s trying to maximize the experience. He always puts so much of himself into everything. Minghao keeps reading, a smile in his voice.

“But I had no idea. And would have died without a clue. Except, she began to sing. And I understood my soul…” 

He looks up again and loses his bravado, becomes barely audible. Because he’s started to think again, and the facts are reappearing, and so is the fear. 

The facts are, one: Unfortunately, Minghao really, really likes Seokmin. Two: Even if he tries to hide himself, he comes loose sooner or later. 

Three: Seokmin is staring at him.

“I understood my soul is a bride enthralled by an unmet groom,” Minghao rushes, snapping back to the page, the letters blurring like they’re on the other side of a smudged glass pane, “or else the groom wholly spoken for. Blue in ardor…um, blue in ardor, happy in eternal waiting.”

He closes the book, can’t quite look up.

“Sorry. I lost my place at the end.”

For some reason Seokmin says, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, I guess,” Minghao says, then shuts up to avoid whatever strange thing is crouching on his voice and making it terse.

“Really! I’m serious! You could be a professional voice actor. Or one of those ASMR people. You should never ever shut up.”

That makes Minghao laugh. Seokmin scoots closer, his smile widening at having achieved this. Their knees are almost touching.

“What do you feel when you read something like that? When you say it out loud?” 

Seokmin’s voice is fearless. It always is. He talks like he sings, like every word is a dance. Inside his throat is a bird always waiting to take flight. If he had any secrets at all he would shout them up to the trees and the clouds. 

“I couldn’t tell you,” Minghao says softly. 

There’s a kind of curiosity transparent in Seokmin’s eyes. A slim bracket of sunlight paints his brown hair red. His smile is fading. 

He’s starting to look, isn’t he. Really look.

Minghao sits up abruptly on his knees. He feels that bright concentrated gaze on him as he puts his book back in his bag and zips it up tooth by careful tooth. 

“It’s strange. I guess I don’t have the…the right words for it yet. Hey, you should get onstage. Class is starting soon.”

  
  
  


He isn’t questioned by Mingyu on why he hasn’t written back to Seokmin yet. That night, though, he walks across the street to try and offer an explanation.

Mingyu’s pickup is parked out back near the trash cans. Someone’s sitting behind the greenish glass. Minghao gets closer and then realizes the person inside is, in fact, not Mingyu, but Mingyu’s father. The door is propped open slightly and the stench of cigarette smoke wafts out of it. Minghao steps closer and clears his throat. 

Silence, as if they are both daring each other to speak. Minghao stares pointedly at the cigarette and Mingyu’s father starts, guiltily grounds it out beneath his shoe.

“Really,” Minhgao says. “In _his_ truck?”

Mingyu’s father chuckles. “You haven’t changed at all, have you!”

“Sorry,” Minghao says, even though he’s not. “Is Mingyu around?”

“I think he’s getting dinner with his teammates tonight.”

“Oh. Thanks anyways.”

“But if you want, Minghao,” he says, opening the door all the way, “you could come over and have dinner with us. You could invite your mother over, too. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“I think she’s busy right now,” he lies. “But thank you for the offer.”

“Alright, then.” 

He looks at Minghao contemplatively, a thoughtful Mingyu-like scan, eyes narrowed. Minghao wonders what he’s seeing. You haven’t changed at all, he'd said.

He’s probably right. Minghao figures inside of himself, perhaps he is still the little kid in that old picture with Mingyu, reticent and prickly-hearted with secrets.

“Let me at least pack you some food.” 

God. Isn’t that something Mingyu would’ve said? Relentless.

“I guess I come in for a little bit,” Minghao concedes. “Just a bit.”

Inside, Mingyu’s father leads him toward the back of the restaurant. The red wood of the tables looks honey-lacquered from the cheerful wall lamps. He smells meat sizzling nearby. The heater is cranked up, but he doesn’t want to take his jacket off, so he tries to roll his sleeves up. 

He can already feel his face going warm from the sudden life in his surroundings. He hadn’t wagered on this. His defenses are down. When Mingyu’s mom rushes out from the back and pinches his cheeks and goes on about how tall he’s gotten, he can only grin at her like a shy red-faced child.

It’s a little suffocating at first, but then he finds he doesn’t entirely mind it. He could get used to it. 

An hour later, and he’s still there. The tips of his ears on fire from the food and the talk and the energy. Mingyu’s dad is telling a story about the first vacation Mingyu ever went on. They were visiting Cebu, and Mingyu saw a lizard on the wall and absolutely flipped his shit and ran down the hotel hallway screaming his head off. Minghao is laughing harder than he’s laughed in probably one whole year, and that is exactly the moment Mingyu chooses to rush in through the front door. 

He stops short at the sight of the four of them crowded around the table like they’re the closest of friends— his mother, his father, his sister, and Minghao. All laughing about him. His face flushes and his cheeks rise in what looks like a mixture of embarrassment and happiness. Although he could sound utterly betrayed, could bite out something like— You left me out? You only came over when I was gone?— he’s nothing but delighted when he says, “Minghao, you came for dinner!”

“Yeah, guess so,” Minghao says, for some stupid reason still smiling. His heart feels so light. Like a red balloon. “Thank you for inviting me.”

Mingyu eats dessert with them, joining the back-and-forths between his mother and his sister, protesting when they try to bring up more mortifying childhood stories and, god forbid, baby pictures. Afterward he heads back into the kitchen to help his father wash up, but he comes back quickly looking a little chastened.

Minghao hovers near the exit wondering if he should just say goodbye and take off. But Mingyu jogs over and opens the door for him, then follows him outside.

The night’s grown cold. Minghao is grateful for his big coat. Mingyu puts on a brave face, but from the way he hugs his own worn brown leather jacket he’s feeling the chill. Instead of going back inside, though, he leans against a wooden telephone pole next to his truck and makes a tense face, trying hard not to shiver.

“That was cool of you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! Come on. Admit it. You had fun.”

“Never said I didn’t,” Minghao says amenably. He looks towards the mountains, the silver crescent moon above the gradations of dark to darker blue. The distant smell of galbi and fried green onions wafts from the restaurant and the chatter of Mingyu’s family is muffled behind them like an old TV. It’s a beautiful night. “Wish I had my camera.”

“You like photography?”

Minghao shrugs. “Just casually.”

“Me too! I’m still learning. I saved up for a secondhand Minolta for my birthday last year, it’s just an old film camera, nothing special. I dunno. What do you like to take pictures of?”

“Mostly scenery.” Minghao points towards the distance at the shaggy trees, the negative space of the slumbering mountains and the moon-shadows stippled between them. “Look at that. It’s like a painting.”

Mingyu hums. The shadow of a hawk streaks across the treeline.

“I don’t know what I’d do if Squahamish didn’t have pieces of good scenery,” Minghao admits. “I’d feel like I was asleep all the time.”

“You don’t like Squahamish.” Mingyu says it like he’s being quizzed. “I noticed that about you.”

It feels like being studied with a certain sort of care. Standing under a stage light. It's almost immediately unbearable.

“Forget it,” Minghao says, clearing his throat. “I wanted to...well, I wanted to apologize for how long it’s taking for me to write back to Seokmin.” 

“Hey, it’s okay! You wrote a lot already. Don’t you think it’s time to, like, ask him on a date?”

“I think this _is_ a form of dating. It feels like one.”

Mingyu laughs. “No way! Dating is having dinner together, or, like, watching a movie, or having deep conversations. _In person._ Not through a letter that someone else wrote.”

“If you ask me, that's a pretty narrow definition.”

“Fuck it.”

“What?” 

He looks over to see Mingyu’s face lit brightly by his phone. “I’m doing it,” Mingyu says, already punching away.

“Wait. Wait!” 

“I sent it.”

“Oh my god!” Minghao’s hands are slack at his sides. He wants to throttle Mingyu with them. “Why would you do that?”

“At some point you just have to think: It’s about being willing to jump without looking.”

“Let me see. Fucking hell.”

 _Wanna go out for burgers or smothgn on sunday,_ followed by six emojis of alternating fries and burgers. And a blue heart, for extra fucking brownie points.

“I can’t believe you spelled it like— and all the fucking emojis— you know what, never mind—” 

“—I think they're cute! Oh, shit—”

The typing bubble appears. They lean over the phone, expectant. 

Promptly, the bubble disappears. 

“Fuck,” Mingyu exclaims, clapping his hand over his mouth. Minghao grabs the phone from him and hastily starts to type out _So sorry omggggg my little sister stole my phone,_ but then the phone buzzes.

_I’d love to~! :D_

“Fuck,” Minghao repeats, a pale and paltry shadow of Mingyu, and Mingyu grabs the phone back and whoops with delight. 

“We did it!”

“We sure did,” Minghao says, stunned. “I can’t believe that worked.”

“I knew it would! That’s Seokmin. He’s so nice. He’s willing to give people a shot. Unlike _someone_ else.”

“Mingyu, you do realize what this means.”

“What?”

“This date is really important. It’s all you, now.”

The smile slides off Mingyu’s face. 

Minghao can see how much he wants this. How much he’s willing to fail. Takes one to know one, and he knows that the way Mingyu is, taking a risk like this is just as hard for him as it was for Minghao to agree to the whole thing.

But he does it anyways. It’s sort of incredible.

“I know that,” Mingyu says. “But you’re still here. With me. Right?”

“Right. I think we have a lot of work to do.” 

“Okay. Then let’s do it. I’ll pay you double.”

“You don’t have to pay me.”

Mingyu frowns. “Really? You mean that?”

Minghao is surprised to find that he does.

  
  
  


On Thursday, Mingyu decides to shadow their school's amateur radio club, since Seokmin is a member. This is a decision he later says he regrets on the account of the president, Seungkwan Boo, who made numerous pointed comments about _some people_ who only showed up once a semester to get an insider glimpse of the glamorous life of a high school DJ so they could brag about it to their jock friends.

“Seokmin can’t multitask,” Mingyu says after school. His voice is jagged as he jogs in circles around Minghao, who is practicing heelflips on the flat pavement behind the restaurant. Mingyu skipped practice, so Minghao guesses this is his way of making up for it. “I think he got flustered by me being there because— whoa there— you good?”

“Go on.”

“Cause he messed up one of the transitions and started playing a song too early.”

“That’s…” Useless? “Ah—” 

Minghao stumbles backward off his board again, for good this time, his breath jerking from his body in a gasp. Mingyu surges forward before he can hit the pavement.

Minghao feels his arms around him like a hug, smells stupid Old Spice deodorant, looks up and finds Mingyu's face dipped low near his, concerned and careful. He hastily breaks free, brushing imaginary dirt off his denim jacket. Mingyu coughs and backs away. 

“That’s not very helpful,” Minghao finishes, picking his board up off the ground. 

  
  


On Friday, Minghao tries to teach Mingyu about musicals. Or, at least, one musical. Seokmin’s musical. The only musical on which he feels he has little bit of expertise because he’s done some extra observation lately. For research purposes. 

“At its heart, the Great Comet is about the meaning of life, and what it takes to find your purpose in your existence and live it fearlessly.”

Mingyu frowns and paces back and forth in the abandoned train car they’ve designated their unofficial Get Mingyu Up To Speed Classroom. “You sure it’s not just about a love triangle?”

“Well, I mean, I guess the musical is, but it’s based on War and Peace, and War and Peace is about—” 

Mingyu laughs. 

“You don’t _actually_ think Seokmin read fucking War and Peace so he could play a part in the _Squahamish High spring musical."_

“He has a lead role, and he’s committed,” Minghao says, mildly offended on Seokmin’s behalf.

“I don’t think anyone’s actually read War and Peace like, beginning to end. I mean, I don’t think that’s actually possible.”

“It’s not exactly Gravity’s Rainbow.”

“I don’t know that reference,” Mingyu says, scowling. “Can we just move on? I get it, I get it. It’s about waking up and looking at the stars and not being afraid or whatever. I don’t get musicals. Like, I saw Les Mis, and I was so confused about why they weren’t allowed to talk. Maybe they’d get somewhere if they stopped singing for two seconds.”

“Maybe you’re right about that, but you will under no circumstances say this to Seokmin.”

“Understood.”

  
  
  


On Saturday, Minghao goes to the auditorium with Junhui for weekend rehearsal. The drop is finished, so Minghao doesn’t really have a genuine reason to be there and Junhui _definitely_ doesn’t, which Jihoon notices.

“Hey, you two wanna make yourselves useful and help us with prop handoffs?” he offers. 

“Absolutely,” Junhui says at the same time Minghao asks, “Is it complicated?”

“Not really.” Jihoon is in the middle of describing what the job would entail when they’re interrupted by the sounds of someone absolutely cracking up. Jihoon looks over and nearly drops his clipboard. "Hey! What the hell! Put the mic down, don't swing it around like that!"

Across the stage, Seokmin is trying to do some sort of lasso trick with a mic, and his co-stars Suhyun and Seungkwan (of school radio DJ fame) are fucking losing it. Seokmin puts it down and collapses into their quite literal heap of laughter.

That’s something. Something important, maybe. Seokmin always has to hold someone when he laughs, like he’s spreading joy-by-contact. He has to feel someone’s happiness as well as hear and see it.

“That’s useless, too,” Mingyu deadpans later.

“It means you should make him laugh, I guess. Or you should laugh when you’re supposed to.” 

“You don’t need to tell me that," Mingyu protests. "He’s funny. It’s easy to laugh around him, like, for real. It’s not something I’d even have to think about at all.”

  
  
  


On Sunday, Mingyu has his date with Seokmin. They’re meeting at the diner on Main Street at eight. Minghao sits in the passenger seat of the pickup for the very first time on the way there. 

It’s spotless on the inside despite how old it is. Like someone went over it with bleach, twice. And it smells clean and fresh. Three of those scented evergreen air fresheners are hanging from the rearview mirror. 

Mingyu drives carefully, leaning forward against the steering wheel. Minghao rattles off instructions the whole way there. 

“Remember, try not to ramble, or else you’ll just be talking over each other. And try to be deep. And romantic.”

“I know, I know. Jesus. We’ll probably end up talking about the Spongebob musical or something the whole time. Relax.”

But it's obvious how nervous Mingyu is. When they park a whole fifteen minutes early he keeps both his hands on the steering wheel in ten and two, whiteknuckling it. He stares out at the cheerful marmalade-colored walls of the diner with a blank expression. 

“You’ll be fine.” Minghao pats his clenched hand in an attempt to make him relax. “He likes you. You’ll be fine.”

“Thanks,” Mingyu mutters, then leaves the truck. 

He slouches when he’s nervous, trying to minimize the amount of space he takes up. Apologetic for his whole big existence. He walks without really picking his feet off the ground, kicking at the dirt with his Nikes with each step. 

“Are you sure you want to wear those with the button-down shirt,” Minghao had asked him critically half an hour ago when he came running out from the restaurant. But he asked what was wrong with them so blithely that Minghao had to let it go. 

Besides, now he looks oddly charming. Mingyu could probably wear neon pink and still look good, Minghao thinks, and then is busy trying to forget ever thinking this when Seokmin appears in the rearview mirror. 

Minghao sinks low in the passenger seat until he’s certain he’s invisible. His heart hammers in his ears. He counts to thirty and then slowly slides up again.

Seokmin and Mingyu are sitting at one of the small tables to the left of the diner. They’re bracketed by cheerful red curtains. The negative space of the window kind of forms a heart, if you think hard enough about it. And Minghao certainly does.

It goes quick. Seokmin, clad in a cardigan, hair floppy over his forehead, talks and smiles and then talks again. Mingyu stares down hard at the table and says something. Seokmin keeps talking, gesticulating, the polite grin never leaving his face. 

Close-mouthed. No teeth. Tiny dimple under his mouth showing the whole time.

Minghao realizes that this means either Seokmin is either very nervous, or he’s being too nice. 

Which means it’s not going well. 

  
  


“That was shit,” Mingyu says half an hour later in the driver’s seat. His whole face is pink. He keeps fanning himself. 

Part of Minghao thinks, _Yes!_ But, strangely, the other part of him feels terrible for thinking that, and also in general feels terrible for Mingyu.

“What happened out there?”

“I don’t know, I think I— I got too nervous or too in my head or something, because I only said a few things and each time it was the _dumbest_ fucking joke ever.”

“Example?

“Like, we were talking about my favorite soccer player being Messi and then they brought the mashed potatoes out and I went, One time Lionel Messi was playing soccer and he stepped on a potato and called it a _Messied_ potato. I don’t even know. Like I guess it was supposed to sound like _mashed_ potato? Holy shit. Why would I do that.”

“Honestly that’s so fucking unfunny that it almost circles back to being funny.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Mingyu thunks his head against the steering wheel and the horn honks for a sad clownish millisecond. “I’m screwed.”

“Maybe,” Minghao says, “maybe it’s just not…”

“Not what? Don't say _not meant to be._ Come on. After all this time I figured you knew that I’m trying to work towards it.”

The diner twinkles on happily out past the windshield, heedless of the feelings swirling inside both of them. It must have been warm inside. The tips of Seokmin’s ears had been red, a shade darker than his cardigan. When he’d laughed his shoulders hadn’t moved. 

If he’d really found anything Mingyu said to be amusing he would’ve pitched sideways like he had suddenly found himself on a ship in a stormy ocean. Or he would’ve clapped, or he would’ve thrown his head back. He wouldn’t have just sat there and grinned and grinned.

“If you have to work that hard.”

“Minghao, that’s the point,” Mingyu says. “That’s the entire point.”

He seems unsure where to go after that. So is Minghao.

“I just don’t get it,” Minghao says eventually. “You’re so well-liked by so many people. Why can’t you…”

“I don’t know. I don't know."

Mingyu sighs and hugs himself. He’d left his old brown leather jacket in the car before the date but he shrugged it on as soon as he re-entered, as if he was looking for some comfort. The radio is singing a cheerful jazzy tune about standing by your man, mocking their stupid entangled situation. 

“I know you think I have a lot of friends or whatever,” Mingyu says, “but I think you’re the person who knows me best.”

“What?”

“The funny thing is I know almost nothing about you. Isn’t that weird?”

“You know me,” Minghao says. But it comes out sounding distracted like a bad lie because he’s still thinking about what Mingyu has just admitted to him. 

His heart, all of a sudden, feels a little too big for his chest. He isn’t sure if the feeling is dread or fear or what.

“Minghao, why did you stop painting?” 

Mingyu is looking right at him. His face always offers a small glimpse into what he’s thinking. His eyebrows are tilted up in something resembling worry. 

“I know what Seokmin said in his letter,” he continues. “I don’t care that you haven’t written back. I just wanted to know why.”

“It’s not important.”

“But you—”

“It’s not important. I gotta go. I skipped dinner for this. I have real work to do. I have to get back to my mother.” 

Minghao starts to gather his shit up. He gets as far as opening the door before Mingyu says, “I haven’t told my parents I don’t want to work at our restaurant after I graduate. I’m scared.”

Minghao stops, the door hanging open.

Mingyu keeps going like he always does. Bridging the gap. Minghao stares up at the night sky and listens to him.

“They need me here,” Mingyu says. “The restaurant isn’t making much money because we live in fucking Squahamish. So even though I want to go to culinary school I can’t tell them that. It’s like I’m lying just to keep them happy, because that’s my responsibility. I’ve been writing letters to food columns around Washington just to try and get the word out, but I know deep inside it’s never going to work.”

Minghao slides his leg back inside and shuts the door, keeping the cold out. 

“You’re very good to your parents,” he says softly.

“So are you,” Mingyu says, never skipping a beat. “We both are.”

“Yeah, but you do it without resentment.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s like you’re the kind of person who washes other people’s dishes and doesn’t expect anything in return. Being like that is hard for me somehow.”

Mingyu is staring at the dashboard. His face is a pane of warm red from his headlights. He has that look that he wears most of the time, like he’s desperately trying not to smile. 

Before he knew Mingyu better, Minghao had assumed that was indicative of an overconfident personality. Someone who had never been knocked down a peg by life in general. He knows now, though, that it’s just a part of how Mingyu is forever willing to accept the smallest things and smile about them to himself.

“That’s really nice of you.”

“I’m not trying to be nice,” Minghao says forcefully. “It’s true. You don’t get it, how much I wish I could do that. The small things.” 

“It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just, I don’t know. Living like that helps me feel useful. It’s like…like a simple way to try and appreciate my place in the world, I guess.”

Funny how it makes so much sense when Mingyu says things like that. Funny how he can wipe the fog off the world and make it so plain, like headlights beaming into a window, sewing some light into the dull gloom.

“What about you?” 

Mingyu’s gaze has turned on Minghao. 

“What about me?”

“What are you still doing in Squahamish?” 

It’s about being willing to jump without looking. It’s about jumping without looking— 

“Minghao, what are you so afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Minghao snaps, something burning at the back of his eyes. 

The radio keeps singing its jazzy love song. Outside the night is endless, like the stars have been scraped out of the sky. The trees are abstract blobs. They might be the only two people in the world, cradled here in the worn nylon seats.

Minghao turns the radio volume all the way down and closes his eyes.

“We had to go where my mother could find a job.”

“She studied trains?”

“My mother has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering,” he says, and his voice comes out strong and he’s proud of it. 

“So she took a job as a station manager?”

“She doesn’t speak perfect English. So I guess according to this fucking place all her work and her knowledge counts for jackshit. She took the station manager job as a preliminary thing. The idea was, she’d work her way up and then we could get out of here. It’s been ten years since.”

Mingyu doesn’t respond, but his breathing is steady and patient.

“I can’t leave her here. Alone,” Minghao says, his voice nothing but a miserable whisper.

Mingyu clears his throat. His words are, for once, carefully chosen.

“For a long time every year on my parents’ birthdays I’d write on their cards: I hope I can make up for all your troubles someday. I guess it felt like I was carrying their burden with me. I mean, all the shit they went through to get here and to bring me up.”

“Do you still feel like that?”

“I guess we can’t think of it that way. We have to try to live our own lives. I don’t know.” Mingyu shakes his head. “I’m working up to getting brave enough to tell them I want to leave.”

“How,” Minghao says, and it’s a sort of begging suddenly. 

He wants Mingyu to have the answers. He wants someone to tell him what to do and how to do it, because if he’s been doing it right so far then he doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.

Mingyu says, easy as reaching out to touch someone’s shoulder: “I have to think that yeah, I’m still here in this town. But I dunno, someday I won’t be. And that’s not a betrayal. That’s just living.”

They sit with each other in silence for a few seconds.

“I have to get back.” Minghao says it like he’s delivering a line. “She’s probably waiting for me.”

She isn’t. She isn’t like that. She doesn’t expect anything, doesn’t ask for anything. And somehow that makes him feel worse. It’s undeserved. 

“Do you mind if I come back to your place with you?”

“Why?”

Mingyu’s eyebrows knit together. Sitting curled up in the driver’s seat he reminds Minghao of the kid in the puffy grape-colored coat from the old photograph, sweetly concerned, desperate to help.

“I’m still hungry, I think.”

Something inside of Minghao melts a little and clears a path out to the world.

Mingyu turns the radio volume up and drives them back home. Minghao leans his cheek against the cool glass of the window and watches the square-lawned streets and the telephone poles slip by. Once at a stoplight, Mingyu reaches out and covers his hand where it lies on his knee. 

Minghao doesn’t know how to say thank you the right way. 

He thinks: It takes effort to reach happiness. It takes pain and disappointment. Thinks: Thank you for telling me that you find that scary sometimes, too.

But he can’t figure out the right order of words. So instead he does something he would never ever ever do otherwise with any other person in any other situation. He leans the opposite way from the window, rests his forehead against Mingyu's shoulder briefly.

He can feel Mingyu's muscles tighten slightly with surprise, then relax. The light changes and the truck rumbles to life and Minghao lifts his head up to look. Mingyu's face is awash in the glowing green. He's trying not to smile again.

Later in his kitchen, Minghao pokes holes in three chicken pot pies with a fork. Mingyu takes them from him and microwaves them, wisely saying nothing about the cuisine choice. While they wait, he jokes around with Minghao’s mother, compliments her on her earrings, says she looks exactly the same from years ago, what’s her skincare routine, honestly, he could use some tips, he's not joking! And when the pies are done, he carries them into the living room without being asked to. 

It’s simple. There’s no room for it to feel wrong. 

Minghao’s mother lingers in the kitchen, raises her eyebrows at Minghao. She doesn’t say anything, but she looks ridiculously pleased.

In the living room, Minghao tucks his knees under him and looks around. Turner Classic Movies has Casablanca on and Humphrey Bogart says, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Minghao’s mother is in her green chair next to him, and Mingyu is sitting between them on their scruffy rug, and just from the back of his head, Minghao can tell that he’s grinning.

  
  
  


Spending the night at Junhui’s means eating too-spicy takeout that Junhui’s mother grudgingly pays for, sitting on Junhui’s Hotarubi no Mori e bedspread watching a sadsack anime and quickly getting bored, and also mocking Junhui’s insistence that he isn’t addicted to his phone and stealing it from him. 

For his own good, obviously.

“Your screen time must be off the charts. You’re gonna have to get those bluelight glasses.”

Junhui is disgustingly pleased with this. “I almost missed you making fun of me! Whenever I’m not being cajoled into conforming to what you deem nonweirdness it feels like you’re sort of disappearing.”

“That’s oddly touching?”

“No, really. I know you’ve been all caught up in the romancing stuff lately. What’s the deal with the whole….?” Junhui draws something in the air with one finger. It’s either a heart or a sideways figure 8.

“They went on one date last weekend, it went shit, and we haven’t talked about it since.”

“You and Mingyu haven’t talked since?” 

“No, we—” He makes a face. “Are you trying to trick me into admitting that we talk about other things?”

“Ah! So you _are_ friends again!” Junhui snaps his fingers. “You’ve been caught in a lie.”

“First of all, I wasn’t lying. Second of all, the whole thing’s in this limbo right now. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

A few seconds of blessed silence, then Junhui asks, “Don’t you think it’s going to come to some really really bad end very soon?”

Maybe, but still. 

“Why would you say that?”

Of course, they both know. Sometimes Junhui is to Minghao as that frog-shaped seismometer was to earthquakes in 132 AD. Sometimes Junhui is to Minghao as X-rays are to broken bones.

“I,” says Junhui, “am just informing you of the most likely outcome.”

  
  
  


Here’s what Minghao used to believe about Mingyu. 

He used to believe that Mingyu disliked failure but was unafraid of it. Mingyu seemed like a person who could afford to always be certain. He didn’t have time to think about embarrassing himself, because in any tricky scenario he only thought of the best possible outcome. 

But now when Minghao closes his eyes, he sees the pattern of the night sky, feels ready to leave the whole goddamn thing behind, and Mingyu’s voice says in its searching way: I’m scared.

And despite that, or maybe because of it, Mingyu keeps taking the first step. 

He takes the first step into Minghao’s kitchen the day after the flubbed first date with a piece of paper in his hand. “It’s easy menu items from our restaurant you can make in, like, half an hour, max,” he explains to both Minghao and his mother. 

The paper has a list of three handwritten recipes, demonstrative doodles and slashed out words interrupting his pretty letters: _Gochu-japchae. Gimbap. Jjajangmyeon (did u know this originated in Shandong!!! :-))_

Minghao’s mother beams. “You’re a very good friend.” She nudges Minghao meaningfully.

“Thanks,” Minghao says, breaking free from his surprise, and Mingyu wraps an arm around his shoulders in an easy half-hug. He smells like lemon dish soap and is about as warm as a goddamn space heater. He offers to drive Minghao to school, but when Minghao denies him, he ditches his pickup and runs up the hill alongside Minghao's board.

“I’m toning my calves!” he explains breathlessly at the top.

Then the next day he takes the first step again. This time with his Minolta into the fringe of trees behind their street, that postcard-piece of Squahamish Minghao compared to a work of art. Somehow Mingyu remembers these kinds of things. The amount of care he takes is surprising.

“We should have a contest taking turns with the camera,” Minghao suggests, mostly to escape his thoughts. “Who can take the best shot.” 

This is a mistake. Because promptly Mingyu tries to climb a tree so he can get a picture of the sun through the leaves and then almost falls backward off the branch, yelping like a startled puppy. His Minolta nearly crashes to the ground, camera strap the only saving grace.

“Oh my god you idiot what the fuck!” 

Minghao clambers half up the trunk and tugs him upright again. When they’re both on solid sweet ground Mingyu pulls him into a hug, his laugh a happy rumble between them, one arm tight around Minghao’s shoulders, one big hand cupping the back of his head.

“I think you just saved my life,” he proclaims, his dumb pretty face all pink and golden.

So then Minghao figures, It’s my turn, maybe. 

That night, he writes four more letters on Mingyu’s behalf. These ones are different. They’re addressed to food critics at the Seattle Food Review, the Spokane Eater, Northwest Travel and Life, the Wenatchee Observer. 

This is only a thank you. A clever targeted push from someone on the outside looking in. But after they’re finished, he feels like he’s not full yet. 

So he calls Mingyu. Even if it feels new and strange, it also feels like the right thing to do. 

“You busy?”

“I’m almost done over here.”

Minghao pulls his curtains back and studies the friendly light spilling out of the restaurant and onto the street. “I was wondering if you wanted to maybe come over? TCM has All About Eve later.”

“Actually do you mind if I bring over a DVD?”

The DVD Mingyu brings is, fantastically, 10 Things I Hate About You. 

He sits on the floor again and casts out weird specific pieces of trivia every ten minutes, like “Patrick was supposed to sing I Think I Love You instead of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, but they already used that in Scream 2.” 

Or, “Did you know that school is in Tacoma in real life? That’s, like, an hour away. We could drive there. I could drive you there and we could recreate Can’t Take My Eyes Off You with Seokmin to win him back. No? Big gestures of love aren’t really your thing? Okay, that’s okay.”

After it’s over Minghao’s mother dozes in her chair, but Mingyu seems to want to linger. Minghao joins him on the floor and they channel surf until they find the hilariously extravagant ending of a cheesy old 90s Bollywood movie. 

The annoying boyfriend is leaving town. He’s standing in-between train cars like an idiot with his hand outstretched, and his beautiful girlfriend is having to run after him in slow motion to the beat of the melodramatic music.

“Oh my god, please don’t run after the train,” Minghao groans. “Do not.”

“It’s kinda sweet,” Mingyu protests.

“Kinda sentimental. Kinda saccharine. Kinda—”

Mingyu elbows him gently. “What’s wrong with sentimental? They’re both embarrassing themselves, but they care!”

“Who can outrun a train? You know, she’s probably pissed off. She’s thinking, Look at this idiot hanging his hand out like he expects me to grab it. Thank god I’ll never get there in time.”

“She looks like she’s going to catch up, though,” Mingyu points out.

Miraculously, she does. There’s an extreme and unnecessary closeup of them grabbing each others’ hands.

“Embarrassing for the train,” Minghao says. He grins when Mingyu laughs at him.

Later, they sit under the overhang of the front porch. Rain drums the roof gently. The quiet tree-lined street looks like another world in the dark, lush and calm and steady. The good parts of Squahamish only make themselves apparent at times like these. 

Minghao asks, “What do you like about Seokmin?”

“Why?”

He shrugs to pass it off as noncommittal. “Just wondering.”

“I like that he’s kind, and he’s good-willed,” Mingyu says slowly. His hair is wreathed golden from the orange porch lights. “When you look at him, you know what he’s thinking.”

“That’s it?”

“I mean…”

The rain forms a gauzy curtain over the trees. The streetlamps down the street cast perfect circles on the road below. 

The more Minghao is getting to know Seokmin, both directly and indirectly, the more he marvels at the way Seokmin is able to find a kind of tender enchantment in everything he sees. It's like to Seokmin, everything has the capacity to hold wonder. Even the terrifying things. 

“What about how he smiles when he sings like doesn’t even know that he’s doing it,” Minghao says. 

He’s feeling what he feels when he writes Seokmin letters. He’s seeing Seokmin on the stage, ready to plummet downward. Seokmin’s smile. The way Seokmin looks when he’s afraid and still willing to try.

“Or…or how he’s never scared to admit when he doesn’t know something. He’s careful, but he’s not scared…he’s not scared of giving himself away. You know what I mean? I think really he’s a very brave person.”

“Oh.”

He realizes instantly that he’s gone too far, because Mingyu is looking at him kind of like he’s about to cry.

Minghao scrambles. “Um, I mean—” 

“That’s what you say when you love someone.”

“No. What? Wait. I would never—”

“I mean, you say shit like that like it’s nothing and you aren’t even in love with him,” Mingyu continues, loud with exasperation. Okay. Thank god. “And I really fucking think I _am_ and I can’t even…” 

He breaks off into a frustrated groan. Minghao leans closer, bolstered by relief. Because holy shit. The mask had almost slipped for good. 

“You try,” he says as directly as he can despite the hammering of his heart thick in his mouth, “harder than anyone I’ve ever known. Just to show someone you love them. And if love isn't the effort you put into it, then what is it?”

The tensing of Mingyu’s jaw relaxes slowly. 

He peers over at Minghao, grins out of one corner of his mouth. So grateful at this simplest of offerings.

“Yeah?” 

At first it's embarrassing how much Minghao takes away from the fact he has somehow managed to comfort Mingyu. He smiles back, hesitant at first. But then he thinks, Fuck it. What is there to be embarrassed about in front of Mingyu anyways? He lets his laugh ring high over the thrumming of the rain. 

“Yes! Are you kidding? You’re such a tryhard. You’re ridiculous.”

Mingyu ducks his head all embarrassed and preening. Minghao rolls his eyes and bumps their shoulders together. They sit there in the dark side-by-side until the rain stops its steady patter.

  
  
  


It’s hard to put your finger on who exactly Seokmin becomes when he’s onstage. In between songs he asks for notes and laughs all embarrassed at every compliment given. Often he says things that seem to be meant only for his own ears. Like: “You sang that part super super sharp, what are you _doing_." Or “You don’t have to breathe so hard here, Seokmin.” 

Every time, he listens to himself. And every time, he wants to do better. You start to realize that when Seokmin sings it’s all him, deeply and purely. Even between acts when they’re told to take five he goes off to the side and he practices a run and that, there, is the same Seokmin as the one under the spotlight.

Minghao only has the chance to see it for himself because he’s finally started going to after-school rehearsals. It’s about three weeks before opening weekend, and the props hand-offs are going smoothly under Jihoon’s watchful eye. After rehearsal, Minghao offers to lock up, heads backstage with the keys.

The pretense is that he’s helping put things away. The real reason is he just kind of has a feeling. And he’s right, because it only takes a few minutes for Seokmin to wander near where he’s slotting a bunch of egg shakers into a box and thump down onto the ground like his legs have given way.

Minghao closes the box, then joins him criss-cross applesauce. He's acknowledged with a soft knee-to-knee bump. Seokmin looks exhausted but fulfilled. Half the auditorium lights are off, and there are shadows under his smiling eyes. 

“You were great today,” Minghao offers.

“Thanks. So were you.”

Minghao shrugs. His 10x10 night sky backdrop is rolled out before them, a displaced window. 

“It’s beautiful,” Seokmin says, touching the edge of the canvas.

“It’s only scenery.”

“Don’t say that! It’s amazing. You must know a lot about art.”

“I know enough, I guess.” 

Seokmin nudges his knee against Minghao’s again, insistent. “Okay. Then brag. Tell me something that I wouldn’t know.”

“First, though, do you like art?”

Seokmin scrunches his face like he’s scared of offending Minghao.

“Be honest,” Minghao encourages, laughing. Things feel so easy in this in-between place. It’s like they’re in a daydream.

“I just feel like I never know if I’m doing it right. You know? Like I see Starry Night or something and I’m like, am I feeling what I’m supposed to be feeling?”

“What do you mean _supposed_ to be feeling?"

“Don’t laugh! Minghao! Wait, okay, I’ll try to explain. I mean feelings are so much. I think words are easier and that’s saying something coming from me. I guess art is beyond that, which is kind of scary. It’s like trying to understand a person. Sorry. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think it does,” Minghao reassures. “I felt like that for a while, too. There’s another Van Gogh that I remember I saw in a museum one time. I must’ve been really young, because I was with my dad, and I had to tilt my head up to see the whole thing.”

“What was it?”

“A wheat field in front of some mountains. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling, but I think I felt it. I was caught off guard by it, honestly. Like it opened some big emotion inside of me I hadn't known was there. Later I found a poem about the series the painting was a part of, and I could almost put words to what I felt, but I didn’t really need to, anyways. I suppose it had been within me all along.”

Seokmin thinks about this for a while, his long fingers resting on the edge of the night sky. Eventually, he asks, “Did you ever think about using your hands to paint this?”

“Are you asking me if I tried to _fingerpaint_ the backdrop?”

He laughs, suddenly joyful. He gets up on his knees and makes a swiping gesture with his arms, nearly swatting Minghao. 

“It’d be so fun. You’d just be able to go crazy! Hey— do you have any spare canvases or anything?”

“I have drafting paper, I think?”

Which is how they start using their hands to make what looks like a beach, or, alternately, wild streaks of bright blue (Seokmin) and the yellow outline of a rectangle to be later filled with abandon (Minghao). A few minutes in and color already dots Seokmin’s black converse and his big white T-shirt, but he doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest when Minghao points this out. 

He gestures at Minghao’s overalls. They were black when they were originally thrifted, but now resemble a night sky if the stars were fragments of rainbows. 

“We’re matching!” 

They keep painting, giggling at themselves. It feels like a return to something Minghao has sorely missed. The artist’s selfishness. Being able to use his body and his mind in any way he wants. 

He lets out a soft _whoop!_ and arcs his hands up from the beach into Seokmin’s sky, the yellow and blue mixing into not-green but instead a gradient of sun-bright, then something new, then something blue.

“Hey!” Seokmin protests, half-thrilled, half-scandalized. But then he joins in. They take turns swiping up, blurring the boundaries between the two worlds they’ve created. One, two, three, four, five times. 

“Maybe it’s our own wheat field now,” Minghao posits. 

“Or a comet in reverse?”

“Starts on Earth and goes back home to the sky?”

“You say things so well,” Seokmin says, delighted. “You don’t even have to think about it.”

“Trust me, I think plenty.”

“Oh, I figured.” He laughs, and it registers to Minghao’s ears as fond. “You look like you’re having fun.”

“Yeah, I guess I really missed this,” Minghao says, half to himself.

“Painting drops isn’t as great, huh.”

“It’s not the same as making your own art.” 

Seokmin sits back, but Minghao keeps pressing his fingers into the wet paint, making shapes where there never were shapes. Not noticing that he’s being observed like he is the most fascinating person in the entire world.

“I always wanted to ask. Didn’t it bother you to have to paint back here while people were singing at the top of their goddamn lungs out there?”

“No, of course not.”

“Really? I always felt like coming back here and apologizing. Or being like, please try to ignore me.”

Minghao admits, half-embarrassed, “Truth be told, having music is actually important for me when I make art.”

“So you really don’t find it annoying if I’m always singing around you?” 

“I could never find your singing annoying.” 

“Funny! The guy I’m kind-of-dating thinks I’m super loud all the time.”

Minghao’s hands come to an abrupt stop.

“It’s weird because the first date we went on he was so quiet, and I had to do all the talking and it was probably ninety percent bullshit. But we’ve hung out once or twice since and I’m realizing he’s as loud as me actually, so when we’re together we probably annoy everyone in a twenty-foot radius and we never get anywhere with our conversations,” Seokmin continues blithely. “You know?”

The paint feels like sludge under Minghao’s fingers. All wrong. He wonders how Seokmin hasn’t noticed that they’re on uneven footing now. That something is off. 

If Mingyu were here he would realize. He would push towards Minghao’s feelings in the right way, worming into the heart of the matter. Then they would both feel better afterward. 

What a bizarre feeling. Wishing that Mingyu were here.

“Yeah, sure,” Minghao says, then lifts his hands up from the absolute mess he has created on their page. The waves of not-green have already started to turn cracked and ugly. The in-between color is never as bright as what surrounds it.

“I think you know him, actually. Mingyu Kim?”

“Oh, yeah!” He hopes his surprise is convincing. “We’re— well, I guess we’re friends.”

“You guess?” Seokmin is surprisingly quick to catch on to this subtlety. “Any red flags I should know about?”

“No,” Minghao says. The paint is drying on his palms, thick like a second skin. “Mingyu doesn’t have many secrets. He’s…he’s just a good guy.”

“Okay,” Seokmin says. His tone is light, but his mouth is doing a weird tight thing, obviously keeping a hundred more questions leashed. “Good to know.”

  
  
  


The problem is that friendship with Mingyu has turned out to be devastatingly easy. Entering his world is as simple as it was for him to crash into Minghao’s.

Like one afternoon a few days after the terrible date, Minghao was helping Mingyu with dribbling drills out near the tracks. They practiced conversation as they batted the ball back and forth, trying to keep a steady rhythm.

“Have you told your parents about culinary school yet?” Minghao asked, aiming a kick that went too left field.

“No. But we got this critic from all the way in Wenatchee who wants to write a review!” The ball nearly slipped away from Mingyu again in his excitement. “I have no idea how he heard about us. But I think it’s a good omen.”

“Wow, look at you,” Minghao said, tempering his smile.

Mingyu arced the ball up in an elegant rainbow. “What was your dad like?” 

Minghao trapped it under his heel and it made a flat slap of a sound.

“Young. Ambitious. Dead.”

He slammed it back, hard, upward. Mingyu caught it with his chest and navigated it easily to the ground.

“Before he died.”

“Young, ambitious…”

The ball streaked between them a few more times. Minghao struggled with the words before realizing that in front of Mingyu he didn’t have to. 

“Too kind.” 

He tapped the ball soft, and it rolled right to Mingyu.

“Thank you for telling me,” Mingyu said, sending it back just as gently. 

“You’re welcome.”

Then to stop Mingyu from looking at him the way he was, Minghao shot the ball off way too hard towards the trees. Mingyu complained about it loudly but retrieved it all the same.

  
  
  


Can you be friends with someone who loves the same person as you without feeling like you’re always pretending in some way? 

Maybe Minghao knew, from the second Mingyu pulled him off his board at the top of that hill, that it would come to this.

The day after that after-school rehearsal he’s doing an AP Calc problem set. He opens the curtain to let in some of the late afternoon sun and there’s Mingyu at the back of the restaurant with Seokmin. 

Seokmin has the Minolta around his neck. Mingyu is teaching him the settings, fingers on top of his hands, their faces close, their noses nearly brushing. 

Mingyu uses Seokmin’s hand to carefully spin the lens setting. He says something and crinkles his eyes. Seokmin laughs and swats at his arm. Then when Mingyu is busy with the camera again Seokmin looks up at him, looks up at him for a long, long time, his smile fading, his face becoming serious with attentiveness. 

Minghao sweeps the curtain shut and can’t for the world describe how he is feeling.

  
  
  


Isn’t this what he had known would happen? Isn’t this what he had expected? Worked towards, even?

Mingyu owes him nothing. Mingyu has paid his debt in money and in friendship, and now what he has with Seokmin has the chance to become solely his own. Minghao has no place inside it anymore.

But for some utterly nonsensical reason, Mingyu is still pulling him into it by the hand.

Seokmin and Mingyu have a second official date on Sunday. Two weeks since their first one. Minghao isn’t sure why he needs to be here, would honestly rather be anywhere else in the world. But Mingyu came over, put an arm around his shoulders, said, “I feel like I can do this when you’re around.”

So Minghao shows up.

In the truck, they sit with the engine on, its steady rumble offering meager comfort. It’s already warmer than it was two weeks ago. Spring has grown full, snuck up on them and caught them unawares. The sky still has some pale blue trapped inside of it.

Minghao says, knowing that he doesn’t need to, “Just be yourself. It’s impossible not to like you when you’re just you. Don’t hold back.”

“Thank you,” Mingyu says, looking at him in this oddly tender way. “For sticking it out with me. I know it hasn’t been— you know. The easiest. And I’ll probably crash and burn, but hey. At least I’m trying.”

“You’re wrong,” Minghao says when he pushes the door open. “I know you’re not going to crash and burn.”

Mingyu smiles, slow and sweet. 

Minghao means it. But he knows, too, that he is no longer at the center. Can no longer serve as any sort of go-between.

In the diner, it becomes even more obvious that things have changed. Seokmin leans forward across the table the whole time, tugging at the neck of his white turtleneck, and Mingyu talks with his hands, never self-conscious. Light, clarity, beautiful boys. They look good together. They match. They talk and talk and talk. Minghao keeps catching himself wondering what they are saying to each other. About twenty minutes into it, he can’t really take it anymore. 

He sighs, unclicks his seatbelt. Pushes the truck door open and stands with his skateboard under his arm, breathing in the sharp April air, trying to just inhale and exhale, trying not to think, trying not to feel anything at all. And when he looks into the diner a few minutes later, Seokmin and Mingyu are gone.

He spins on his heels and finds them outside. Glowing against the diner windows, backlit like two untouchable angels. Seokmin’s hand is wrapped around the back of Mingyu’s neck as he studies him, and from even from far away, even from behind the truck, Minghao almost recognizes the look on his face. 

That fond, intense concentration, beaming like a lighthouse. The kind of tenderness inherent to people who love too much and fall too hard. 

Then Seokmin pulls Mingyu in towards his mouth, and Minghao has to look away. 

Looks anywhere but at the two of them. At the blurring ground as he gets off to a running start. At the sky as he feels for his balance with his body. Anywhere will do. Anywhere but at the boys who are unafraid of letting everyone see the artifacts inside their hearts. Two boys like luminous glass. Transparent. 

Minghao is not a part of their world. He doesn’t know how to be.

He skates home building momentum, reckless momentum, weaving side to side across the pavement, making the shitty Squahamish scenery into absolutely nothing, just like what he wants to feel inside of himself, and when he flies past the curb near Mingyu’s house his wheel catches on something and he goes pitching forward and tumbles head over heel and arm over foot like a bird who has suddenly forgotten how to fly.

He sits there ass-flat on the pavement seeing stars. Even his teeth feel foreign to his body. 

The world reappears slowly. He stares at the circle of streetlamp light in front of him. His board has come to a reluctant stop inside of it. 

It takes him a good few seconds to realize what has happened. How long since he’s wiped out this fucking badly? 

Of course. That day those many weeks ago when Mingyu ran after him and pulled him into this new world, this world which feels too small for the three of them, which delineates who Minghao is and who he has failed to become with terrible fluorescent clarity. 

Minghao sits there on the ground for a while feeling dissolved, feeling numb. His ears ringing. How it feels, how he feels unsheathed from all his bones. He can't understand it, because he’s never felt quite like this before. He doesn’t have the words for it.

  
  


_Minghao,_

_One time, I had this weird dream._

_I was sitting outside a house by the ocean and I had my guitar. I was singing and my eyes were closed, but I knew you were next to me. Mingyu was lying on the porch behind us. I think he was asleep, but he was probably smiling anyway._

_I don’t know what that means, but I know how I feel about both of you. I feel so full of whatever this is. I want to say it better but I can’t figure out the right way to do it. I wish I was in that dream again. The three of us didn’t have to talk. We just felt what we felt, and that was enough._

_Is this what it’s like for you? Struggling to get all those feelings into a few words?_

_Why have you forgotten your brushes and your own body? I know you, and I know there’s something magical in the way you try. I mean, how you never let what you feel go to waste._

  
  


The curtain falls after Act 1 and Seokmin waits in the shadows of stage right. He stares off at nothing in particular, his lips moving as he mutters silent words. Escaped slices of blue spotlight silhouette his curls and his stranger’s face. So unlike himself under all the makeup.

After Act 2 he does it again, only this time he’s on the left wing. Minghao is crouched near him on the ground for the prop hand-offs, and Seokmin is just barely audible.

“I can do this, I can do this, I can do this,” is what he’s saying under his breath, over and over like he’s reciting a poem, and he is suddenly recognizable again. 

What an entirely Seokmin thing to do. Minghao has to look away beyond the edge of the stage to stem the bubbling affection inside of himself, but it’s like pressing a tissue to an open fucking wound.

“I can do this I can do this I can do this,” Seokmin keeps whispering. And then he goes out and does it.

Minghao figures if he ever asked Seokmin who he felt like when he was on stage, he would say— Why? Do you think I felt like anyone other than myself?

The prop hand-offs are, by now, perfect and almost thoughtless. Most of opening night Minghao watches Seokmin being brilliant. When it’s over the roar of the crowd comes secondhand and goosebumps alight on his arms even in the darkness. 

Minghao closes his eyes and imagines that he is the one being applauded for. That in the light, he has finally become his truest self. 

Later he wades through crowds of crew and cast all congratulating each other, giddy from their success. He stops outside the big dressing room. Despite the door between them, Mingyu’s voice echoes unburdened as ever. 

Minghao can’t distinguish the words but he can distinguish the laughter. The kind of loud laughter you resent if you’re outside of it. He’s about to walk away, because fuck this entirely, he doesn’t have to hear it, but the door swings open and nearly smacks him in the face.

“Hey! Minghao!”

Mingyu’s smile is uncertain. Fake, Minghao thinks. Staged.

“Hey.”

“Been a while, right?”

It has been. They eat lunch together sometimes, Junhui between them like a mediator. But there seems to be nothing to talk about. 

The day after the second date two weeks ago, Mingyu offered to drive him to the art store on Main Street because Minghao had once mentioned wanting to replace his old dried out markers. Under the too-bright lights, carefully swatching Copics on the sample paper, Minghao asked, “What did you and Seokmin talk about last night?”

“Uh, I don’t know. Just casual stuff. It was just, I don’t know. Fun. We ate and talked and made fun of each other a lot. And then…”

Minghao glanced over his shoulder. Mingyu was grinning down at the ground, capping and uncapping a pen like he didn’t know what else to do with himself.

“And then we kissed. And we held hands when I walked him over to his car. I think he really likes me.”

“How do you know?”

“Huh?”

“Like— without saying anything?”

Mingyu shrugged, made a face. “What a weird thing to… I don’t know. You just kind of feel it. I mean, we only let go of each other when he had to get into his car and he made this sad little face. So I blew a kiss at him and he laughed at me. And I knew that it was fine.”

Minghao turned back around and put the Copic back into its slot with infinite care.

“Hey,” he said to Mingyu hollowly, “good for you.”

And ever since, Minghao has been dodging calls, forgetting about texts. Keeping his curtain shut.

Now Mingyu is too close, buoyed by his unseen currents of everlasting hope. Minghao holds his ground. “Sorry, I just wanted to go in there and congratulate Seokmin.”

“Oh, yeah. For sure. See you around later?”

He doesn’t respond, only sighs and laughs airily because he has no idea what the fuck he should say.

“You do that when you’re hurt,” Mingyu says. He steps closer, his eyebrows starting to draw together. “What did I do? What’s wrong? You’re doing it again. You’re leaving me again.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Minghao says flatly, and heads into the dressing room. 

Doesn’t try to see Mingyu’s reaction at all, because he’s sure it’ll throb like a goddamn rabbit-punch to the stomach.

Seokmin is alone. He has his guitar cradled in his arms, thumbing the strings, framed by the bare bulb lights around the mirror. His stage makeup is off and his hair hangs on his forehead, stray wavy strands of dark brown over his eyebrow. He looks oddly vulnerable. When he looks up and sees Minghao, he melts into a smile, tips his head at the chair next to his. 

Minghao sits. 

“When you went offstage between acts, I heard you saying something.”

Seokmin nods. “Yeah. I was reciting, like— a spell? To sort of hypnotize myself into being able to do it?”

“Why do you need to do that?”

His mouth curls a little. He can’t quite look at Minghao anymore, which means...which means what? Is he nervous? Is he scared? He keeps plucking at the strings, twining together an arpeggio, an up-down scale, until it begins to form a bittersweet melody.

“I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I just do.”

“Did you know,” Minghao says, because he’s in front of Seokmin and he has nothing to lose anymore, “that your face when you sing alone and your face when you sing in front of so many people are the same?”

Seokmin’s fingers still. 

The stare he pins Minghao with now is like a piece of sea glass. Opaque, a broken-off piece of an immeasurable whole.

All people are complicated, aren’t they?

“Do you mean that?”

“I do mean it. I always mean it.”

Seokmin is silent.

“When you sing,” Minghao says, his voice rising in desperation to get his point across, this one honest thing, “it’s like you’re at the center of the world. You always work hard. You’re always trying to reach something better. I can tell your heart is soft, but you shouldn’t ever be disappointed in yourself. Everyone around you thinks you’re amazing.”

Seokmin doesn’t say anything. Instead, he starts to go all watery-eyed. 

Minghao’s face and chest grow warm with surprise, although maybe he should have expected this.

Because by now he has realized that yes, yes, yes, he knows Seokmin. Yes he does. Knows him by his face and what he's afraid of and what he loves and the way he talks and the way he sings, and now the way he cries, too. Neither of them looks away from each other.

“I used to have stage fright." Seokmin's voice is wobbly and low but he exhales, keeps going, twisting his mouth sideways, trying to trap his overspill inside of him. “Really bad. I mean like sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night because I was so nervous about messing up, and I know I’m not perfect now, not even close. But thank you for saying that.” 

“Seokmin, I really did mean what I— what I said. You know that, right?”

He swipes at his face. “Yeah. I used to worry that sometimes— you know, sometimes it was beyond me, that I wasn’t— I wasn’t singing the words like they were meant to be sung. But I realized that was probably how the songwriter felt while writing them. Scared and fucking unsure about everything. Words aren’t enough. It’s about the feeling. You know?”

“I do know,” Minghao says, and his own voice comes out raw. What he feels in his heart is so utterly inexpressible that all he can say is, “I do, I do.”

“I know,” Seokmin whispers. “Thank you for understanding.”

Then he blinks hard and studies Minghao, whose face is probably caught between concern and a hopeless fucking car-crash of fondness. Seokmin must only catch the concern because he dissolves into laughter and buries his face in his hands. 

“I’m so sorry, you look so— I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m sorry.”

Minghao gets up without thinking. He wraps his arms around Seokmin’s shoulders and holds him like he's a bird that has crashed into a window, delicate and careful. He breathes slow and steady with his eyes closed and tries his best not to be terrified. A few endless seconds, and Seokmin makes a noise against his chest. Minghao leans back and looks.

The world around him that he has tried to create, his own carefully constructed reflections, his flimsy lies, are all disappearing. And there’s only this. Only himself, being stared at by Seokmin. Being stared at in a way that he can’t even begin to understand. 

Someone clears their throat. 

Minghao looks up into the mirror and sees his own reflection, his frightened pink-nosed face, his hands curled into Seokmin’s hair, and behind them, a tall figure in the doorway. 

Mingyu. 

Minghao steps away from Seokmin with a jerky inhale. His hands clench at his sides in the absence of warmth. He has tears in his throat. His face is hot with all his secrets.

Seokmin hasn’t stopped staring at him with that fucking look in his eyes. Like Minghao is the first and only person he has ever seen. And Minghao is so, so afraid of what he is feeling, what he knows they are all feeling. He hates himself for it. For all of it. 

He starts to back away.

“Wait. Minghao, wait. There’s an afterparty at Josh’s,” Seokmin says, his voice still rough with tears. “You should come. Please?”

“Okay. Okay.” He’s stepped back far enough that he hits Mingyu’s shoulder.

“Minghao,” Mingyu says, something desperate in his voice, but Minghao is gone, out of the auditorium and into the night.

  
  
  


Josh goes to community college nearby, but he went to Squahamish High and regularly helps out with theater stuff. He also throws great fucking parties. Half the people at his house are college-aged and there's more than enough to drink. Within half an hour Minghao is one and a half Solo cups in, dizzy in the kaleidoscope swirls of the off-brand Party City mini disco ball tenuously hanging from the ceiling. 

Junhui, who drove him, has to grab him after he almost falls all the way down the stairs. Whoever made the punch either had no fucking clue what they were doing or entirely too much of a clue. Probably it was Josh’s pretty friend Jeonghan. Minghao imagines Jeonghan draining a whole handle of New Amsterdam into the mix, whispering, “This is for you, my sad pathetic lonely little friend.” He also imagines Jeonghan’s buff boyfriend Seungcheol, who’s tried to press a water bottle into Minghao’s hands more than once already, watching on with an extremely concerned expression on his kind face.

Minghao snorts into his cup, then stumbles out of Junhui’s well-meaning hands and nearly sloshes the rest of his drink onto Vivi’s shirt.

Vivi steadies him. Her candyfloss pink hair looks lilac under the lights. “Whoa, Minghao, you good?”

“I’m fantastic. I’m…”

“You seem great.”

" _Seem?_ I _am_ great."

“Ask him if he’s sure he should be drinking that,” Junhui suggests.

“You sure you should be drinking that?”

Just to spite them, Minghao chugs it. “I am in control of my own life,” he announces afterward, trying for certainty, ending up in the general vicinity of a lackluster affirmation recitation. 

Around the corner he nearly crashes into Sooyoung making out with AP Lit TA Wonwoo. Wonwoo’s glasses are fogged up like he’s a manhwa character. Minghao makes an icked out noise and Soonyoung breaks away to grin at him, then dives right back again.

Disgusting. Gross. Good for them.

Minghao skirts around and proceeds to drift this way and that, unmoored and more than a little lost. He hasn’t even seen Seokmin yet. Mingyu, neither. 

Thank fucking god. He’d probably throw up on their shoes. 

He pours himself more punch and bobs along to the atrocious music just to do something with his own body. A few minutes later Soonyoung, who has evidently unlatched himself from Wonwoo and is now having a dance-off with Chan in a corner of Josh’s living room, grabs his arm and pulls him into the fray. 

They bump around like manic pinballs. Josh keeps running about straightening all the cheesy printed-and-framed Instagram photos they knock over. Soonyoung clambers onto the dining table, somehow, and then hoists Minghao up with him, and they’re hitting the woah (Soonyoung) and popping and locking (Minghao, sort of) to OneRepublic, of all things.

“Josh,” Minghao yells over his shoulder, “your music fucking sucks!”

“You losers are having a great freaking time, though,” Josh yells back. 

Soonyoung screeches, _"Freaking?"_

Minghao laughs, and then his foot lands on something wet and shoots out from beneath him, and the last thing he sees before he falls backward into empty space is Soonyoung’s mouth opening in a perfect O.

Before he can hit the ground, he lands caged in someone’s solid arms, his feet still hooked onto the edge of the table. The arms let him down to the ground with infinite care. The face they belong to shoves itself into his field of vision like a nosy puppy and Minghao jerks back but can’t quite escape.

“Shit,” he mumbles. His luck has run thin. It always seems to.

“Are you okay,” Seokmin asks worriedly, his eyes wide, his nervous mouth close to Minghao’s face. He looks pretty. He is pretty.

“Here!” Mingyu, seemingly materializing out of nowhere, shoves a water bottle into Minghao’s hand. 

He’s led to a couch somewhere a few feet away, sandwiched between the two of them. They both sit turned towards him like particularly kindhearted guard dogs. Minghao takes a drag of the water, squeezing his eyes shut. Wills the world to disappear. Or, at least, wills himself to disappear.

By the time he drains the bottle a minute later, he is, unfortunately, still way too drunk in Josh’s stupid living room with Seokmin and Mingyu on either side of him. He becomes aware of the fact that Seokmin on his right is patting his hand, and Mingyu on his left is rubbing circles into his back. 

The room is spinning, and so is his stomach. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be between them anymore. He drops his head down until his forehead is touching his knees.

“Whoa, Minghao,” Seokmin says from above. “Are you—”

“I’m taking him home.”

“I can—”

“No. It’s fine. I got it.”

“No, no, it’s—”

“I got it, I got it.” 

“Are you sure?”

Someone wraps their large hands around his shoulders and gently tips him upright. Minghao opens his eyes and learns that this is Mingyu, leaning close and frowning like it’s a goddamn Olympic sport.

“I’m gonna get you home.”

“No—” 

Too late. Mingyu is already helping him stand and then he’s being led across the fuzzy blurring living room. He doesn’t even get to turn around and look at Seokmin. At the door he hears Junhui’s voice asking something worriedly and Mingyu responds, steady and reassuring. And then they’re out into the freezing night.

Minghao is seatbelted tight into the passenger side of the pickup before he manages to come out with, “Wait. Wait. You can’t take me home. You can’t take me home.”

“What? Why not?”

“I can’t let my mother see me like this.”

“Minghao—”

“I can’t, I can’t.”

“Minghao, she’ll probably be concerned more than anything else. It’s okay. I’ll explain it to her—”

“It doesn’t matter!”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to be better,” Minghao says. “I just want to be good.” 

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Mingyu leans over and wipes at his cheek carefully with his thumb. He can't look at Mingyu's face. His throat feels too small. He hears the car start and he tries to keep it quiet, as silent as possible, and kind of shakes it out, his arms wrapped around his own body. 

The world is passing by outside the window dark blue like his backdrop. Empty and devoid. A void. That’s what his backdrop painting is. A nothing-painting. That’s what he wants inside of himself instead of all this shit that he’s holding.

Mingyu keeps sayinng, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Once, “You are good. You are.” 

And then finally, “We’re home.”

Minghao lets out a shuddering exhale and looks. 

Oh. Good. They’re parked behind Mingyu’s place. 

Mingyu is anxiously watching him, his denim-clad knee knocking against the steering wheel, up, down, up, down. He’s wearing a denim jacket, too. Funny. Swathed in all blue. That’s a Canadian-something. 

Minghao looks out the windshield to avoid the weird Mingyu-sized hole in his heart. The stupid endearment that capsizes him as it always does. He tries to stare into the dim restaurant. No sign of life, no life. Mingyu’s parents must be asleep already. 

Suddenly Mingyu is next to him, opening the car door, holding him up by the waist before he can go plummeting down to the ground. “I got you,” Mingyu tries to whisper. Mingyu is incapable of whispering. He’s always so loud. He holds Minghao up and they travel forward like it’s a three-legged race and they’re two people combined into one, through the restaurant’s back door and up the stairs, keeping it as quiet as they can. 

Minghao is deposited gently onto a bed that feels too big for him. There are glow-in-the-dark stars up on the ceiling. He imagines baby Mingyu in his puffer coat standing on his tip-toes, reaching up to stick the tiny stars on one by one, frowning with concentration. This makes him tear up again. Everything is making him so, so sad.

“Where are you gonna sleep,” he says, all choked up.

“I have blankets, it's okay. Sleeping on the floor is supposed to be good for posture, I think.” 

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. I promise it's going to be okay. You just had a rough night. What are friends for, huh?” 

Mingyu’s voice sounds like it’s from mission control. Minghao is floating somewhere near the rings of Saturn. He turns his wet face to the side and sees Mingyu sitting by him on the edge of the bed, patient and so near. 

Mingyu isn’t smiling. He looks exhausted. Or sort of…sad? 

Sad. Yes. His eyebrows are doing a funny sad thing. 

“Someday I’m going to move far away from Squahamish,” Minghao murmurs.

“Where are you gonna go?”

“Um…somewhere near a beach. On a beach.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s right.”

“But what if I still want to live across the street from you,” Mingyu says. “What then?”

“There are no streets on beaches. Stupid.”

“Okay. So then I’ll build a house next to your house on the beach brick by brick. Even if it takes ten years.”

“You’d build it _brick by brick?_ You always make things so fucking hard for yourself.”

“You’d know something about that, huh.”

Minghao manages to ignore this. “Why do you always do that? Make it difficult?”

“Because then,” Mingyu says, “because then it’s more meaningful.”

“You’re so.”

Mingyu waits. His ceiling cosmos is golden on the edges of his lashes, his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose. 

“You’re so…” 

Mingyu is getting closer, inch by inch, or maybe Minghao is moving up towards him like a sunflower. What must it have been like to grow up like Mingyu? So earnest and so pretty and so so so...

There are shadows under Mingyu’s eyes like bruises. He must be so tired. Minghao has never noticed that before.

“You’re so frustrating.”

Mingyu leans back like he’s been slapped. 

“Frustrating?”

“It’s like you never give up,” Minghao says blearily. He blinks, blinks slower, sinks back down to the bed. The world narrows to the glow of the stars in Mingyu’s eyes. No, the glow of himself in Mingyu’s eyes. He’s seeing his own dimming reflection in the dark. “You should know when to give up.”

“Is this you giving up, then?”

“I don’t know.”

He closes his eyes. He can’t bear to keep them open. He can’t bear to see Mingyu’s sad sweet face anymore. 

There’s something soft pressed to his forehead briefly. Mingyu’s voice is hazy when it whispers, “I’m so sorry about everything, Minghao.” 

And then Minghao is, thankfully, somewhere far away. 

He dreams about Seokmin and Mingyu. He can’t really remember it when he wakes up halfway through the night, but his mouth tastes like salt, and when he reaches up he finds his cheek sticky with dried tears.


	3. How much I go on living

_Minghao,_

_The only things I know about Van Gogh are the sad ones. I looked for that painting you told me about once, the wheat field with the mountains, and I found out he painted it and all the other ones like it because it was the view out of the hospital he was staying at just before he died._

_I couldn’t stop looking at that painting because I knew it was trying to tell me something important._

_I thought about how I’d never looked out of a window and felt quite like this before. And how the person who painted this beautiful thing was at the saddest point of his life, and he still saw how good the world was, how good it was that he had his part in it._

_I saw the dark blue mountains, and the white clouds in the sky, and the red and gold underneath. All that light falling onto the field._

_It reminded me of you. I think I understand what you were trying to tell me. I hope you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you._

  
  
  


“I don’t read much,” says Seokmin, “but someone I really trust recommended this to me, and I read it and cried. So I thought it might make an interesting birthday gift.”

Is this still the dream?

Could be. For a second Minghao can’t recall where he is. 

His mouth is cotton and his face doesn’t feel real. He squints up at a constellation of pale yellow stars stuck onto the ceiling. 

Mingyu’s room. He’s in Mingyu’s room.

He jolts up to a vaguely sitting position and the world swirls like he’s a goldfish in a teetering bowl. He very nearly curls up into a miserable ball on the bed again. But Seokmin’s voice, clear and definitely not an auditory hallucination, says: “I’ll drop it off in his room, then!” 

It’s louder than before. Fuck. Shit. 

Minghao catapults himself off the bed and nearly trips over Mingyu, who is curled up on the floor, somehow fast asleep in yesterday’s all-denim get-up. 

“Wake up,” he hisses. When Mingyu ignores him, Minghao digs his freezing cold toes into his arm. 

“What the—”

“Seokmin is here.”

“What? Now?”

Minghao never took his contacts out. They’re all dry and gritty. He blinks hard, grabs his coat from where it’s draped on the bed— odd, he doesn’t remember taking it off— and shrugs it on, shoves his feet haphazardly into his Vans. Mingyu rustles around behind him and bumps into the bedpost by the sounds of it, mutters a soft curse in his sleep-husky voice. 

Remnants of feelings from the night are so suffocating, as lingering as the hangover. Minghao tries to shrug off the humiliation of whatever went on, however he gave himself up. Forget it. He beelines for the door. 

He almost makes it, too, when it swings open, revealing Seokmin, tall and steady in the late morning sun. 

Seokmin is silent as he sizes the situation up. Cataloging Minghao’s puffy red eyes, hair all over his face, jacket hanging half off his shoulder. 

Minghao opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again.

“I came by to thank Mingyu.”

“For, uh, taking him home last night,” Mingyu puts in from across the room.

Seokmin looks from face to face, his mouth twisting like he’s either trying not to smile or keeping from blurting something. 

“Right,” is what he ends up with. 

He’s carrying a book. A copy of what Minghao had been reading. He shies away from Minghao’s eyes and holds the book out towards Mingyu. 

“I just wanted to drop this off. It’s, um, a super late birthday present.”

Mingyu takes it, staring at the cover like it’s a great revelation. For the life of him, Minghao can’t remember if he did anything special at all for Mingyu on his birthday three weeks ago. He feels terrible. He should leave. But his feet don’t want to move. 

The three of them stand there, caught in the uneven slats of morning coming through Mingyu’s blinds. Unsure where to look but at each other. Everything is such a big goddamn mystery. 

Minghao faces Seokmin, who is chewing on his lip.

“Did you really read the whole book?”

“Of course. I’m not sure if I understood all of it, but I think I felt what I was supposed to feel.” 

Seokmin looks up, from Minghao to Mingyu and then back at Minghao again. Something in his face is almost wistful.

Minghao hates that when Seokmin looks at him, he feels like a feather afloat in mid-air, spared from gravity. He hates that looking at Mingyu makes him want to apologize, crumble at the foundations, say I'm sorry and I miss you and I want to be better, I want, I want—

He doesn't allow himself to measure the depth of how far his heart has sunk without any reason at all. Why? When he's away from them, why does he feel dark and still like stagnant grey rainwater? Why does he feel like the world is as devoid of sunlight as the bottom of the sea? Why can't he feel as hollow as an abandoned birdhouse, filled with nothing, nothing, nothing at all? 

“I have to get back to the station,” he says to no one in particular, and then he leaves them behind.

  
  
  


AP exams come and go. Minghao makes it through.

Prom looms in the near distance like a shitty landmark, the kind you drive miles to get to, only once you get there you realize it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Tourist-trap with overpriced tickets, et cetera. Needless to say, despite all of Chan’s banners and enthusiastic advertisement, Minghao will not be attending.

Somehow, though, he gets roped by Junhui into getting tickets to the purported big soccer game of the year. 

It’s being held the day before prom, on a Saturday morning. A week before the deadline for college decision day. 

Minghao has made no headway with his choice in the last two weeks, but Junhui has decided he’s heading south to USC for acting. He blurted it out to Minghao one night while they were playing PUBG.

“I’ll get Tony Hawk’s signature for you,” he said, and grinned. Minghao rolled his eyes. They both ignored the fact that Tony Hawk lived in San Diego, not LA. The distance from Squahamish was the same. The distance from Minghao was the same.

The morning of the game, Junhui saves a seat at the very top of the bleachers. When Minghao shows up in the middle of the first half and slides his board under their legs, Junhui is caught in horrified awe.

“They’re doing _so_ bad.” The fluorescent red on the scoreboard announces _Home: 0, Guest: 3._

“Three? Already? How the hell?”

“I don’t know! Look, there’s your boy.”

“He’s not my boy,” Minghao says irritatedly, but cranes his neck to get a look. 

Biding his time at midfield on the right wing, Mingyu is sweat-soaked in the blue Squahamish High jersey, brilliant as a late spring perennial. He’s pacing back and forth, gesturing at Hansol, the left winger.

“Is it true that Squahamish has never even gotten on the scoreboard in fifteen years?” Junhui asks.

“Yeah.”

 _"Wow._ That’s actually extremely impressive in its own right.”

But this seems to be fated to change on today, of all days, because ten minutes into the half there’s a flurry of activity at the guest’s end. A bit of confusion, and then the ball comes loose and ricochets towards Hansol. Hansol takes it up the field with understated ease, volleys it across.

Mingyu goes sprinting. The ball leaps before his feet as if it’s on a string, drawn forward by a higher power. He’s ten, five, two feet away from the goal. 

He does a deceptively nimble fake-out and foregoes two defenders, passes it back over to Hansol, and Hansol drills it home. 

The bleachers erupt. Well, not really, because not a lot of people tend to show up to a Squahamish High morning soccer game even if it _is_ _a_ purported “Big Game,” but Minghao is on his feet and so is Junhui, clapping so hard their palms are ringing. And it could be a figment of wistful imagination, but when Mingyu breaks free from the entangled team celebration and grins up at the bleachers, it feels like he’s looking up at Minghao. 

Minghao tears his eyes away and catches sight of Seokmin a few rows below them. He’s clapping, too. Weird that he isn’t screaming or cheering or generally being loudly overenthusiastic.

“Listen, I think I’m gonna go and talk to Mingyu afterward.”

Junhui acknowledges this worriedly and waits on the bleachers with Minghao until most everyone is gone. “Hey, hey,” he says, tugging on his hand before Minghao begins to wind his way down the stairs. “Will you tell me what’s going on with you and Mingyu and Seokmin? Later?”

The guilt, ever-familiar, settles like fog. Mainly he’s been avoiding Junhui’s questions about the whole situation, his gently joking prods. Nothing's happening. Nothing will ever happen.

But there’s something about today. Maybe seeing Mingyu running alone down that field, fearless. Maybe the fact that there’s one week left in the semester.

The amount of minutes Minghao has are seeping away like a leak that can't be dammed. He tries for a smile that comes out wan and says of course he will.

  
  
  


The old vending machine glows like a beacon in the dusty green locker room. Mingyu is digging inside of it with utmost concentration.

“All hail the pride of Squahamish,” Minghao says from the doorway, rolling his board back and forth with one foot.

Mingyu startles and turns. He’s holding two cans of Pocari Sweat, one in each hand. He’d talked about the vending machine being the only place in Squahamish with good sports drinks at typical breadth weeks earlier. 

Minghao knows so much about him. Too much. 

Minghao knows that despite his fear of heights, one time Mingyu climbed the tree outside and came in through Minghao’s bedroom window because he didn’t want to disturb Minghao’s mother sleeping in front of the TV. Minghao knows that all of Mingyu's promises to start reading his book recommendations will probably never come to fruition, because Mingyu likes movies so much more than books, and he likes, most of all, the hazy sleepy discussions that take place after the credits. Minghao knows how long it took Mingyu to cross-stitch the blue mountain in an embroidery hoop hanging above Minghao’s desk— three days, because he worked on it every night before his first date with Seokmin when he was too nervous to sleep. 

Minghao isn’t sure what he’s going to do with his pocketfuls of Mingyu in a month. Even when they’re both irreversibly on their separate paths for good, he’ll carry those pieces tucked inside of him somewhere forever. 

It breaks his heart a little bit. 

“We still lost in the end,” Mingyu says ruefully. “Can’t believe you came to see me. I didn’t think you would.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Seokmin?”

Mingyu shrugs. “We’re kind of on a break. Sort of. I don’t know.”

Minghao frowns. He steps forward, hears his board gently roll away across the tiles. 

“What? Really?”

Minghao's heart is starting its familiar plummet. Then has all this been for nothing? Becoming friends and then not-becoming friends, all of the fear and the giddy dizziness that replaced it and then the self-imposed aloneness, too? The aloneness that felt so much worse than before, because maybe he'd gotten used to Mingyu and Seokmin, because maybe his life was, in fact, better with both of them in it?

“But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about you. You and I. We haven’t exactly…” Mingyu laughs, but it’s not really a laugh. More just a hurt exhale through his nose. 

He studies the dumb Pocari bottles. His skin tinted orange and blue from the vending machine glowing behind him.

“I don’t know. I think you’ve been ignoring me. I want to talk to you, but I don’t know how. If our places were switched I think you’d know exactly what to say. But I just don’t. I’m sorry.”

Minghao's breath rattles inside his chest. He steps even closer.

“Mingyu, I really mean this. It’s not you in particular. It’s not anything bad. I'm sorry. I’ve just been stressed.”

Mingyu pockets one Pocari, then the other, left and right in his brown leather jacket. “Stressed about college decisions?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Minghao is being stared at like he’s a stranger.

“What?”

“I know,” Mingyu says.

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say it out loud. Say you’ve been in love with Seokmin this whole fucking time.”

Blood roars in Minghao’s ears. The rush of the ocean. He’s standing on the edge of a cliff. Or maybe he’s already two feet in the water with the sand slipping away from beneath his toes. 

He can say nothing. His traitorous words stick in his throat. 

Mingyu takes a step forward, so Minghao takes a step backward. Hits the old corkboard on the wall. The flat plastic end of a thumbtack presses into his shoulder. 

He tries to breathe again. The world is crumbling down around their ears.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” Mingyu says, but weirdly enough he doesn’t look pissed. He just looks desperate. “I see the way you look at him. I’m not stupid.”

“Mingyu.”

“Why can’t you just say—”

“Because! Because I’m not you,” Minghao snaps. 

Mingyu closes his mouth, getting his terrible trapped look again, but now Minghao can’t stop. 

“Because I agreed to this whole fucked up thing.” He’s too loud and too sharp but he keeps pressing. “Because you try so hard and you’re never afraid of showing it. You’re like Seokmin. The two of you— it’s like you’re never afraid. I don’t know what love is but if it’s giving yourself up, if it’s being honest, then I’m no good at it.”

“That’s not true. Minghao, that’s not true.”

“You and Seokmin, I know that you’ve earned it. And I haven’t. I just haven’t.” His voice cracks. It’s horrible. Everything is wrong. Everything has gone to shit. 

“Listen to me.” Mingyu is inches away. “I know you hold your own heart too close to yourself because you’re afraid. But we’re all afraid. And you _are_ honest. You’re always honest.”

“I’m not.” 

“Talking to you is so easy. We both know I’m no good with this shit but it’s like.” Mingyu breaks off, chest heaving. Too much inside of himself that he can’t give away fast enough. “It’s like I don’t have to be good at words around you because you understand me anyway. And I understand you.”

“No,” Minghao says, helpless. He can’t even begin to express what he is feeling. He's a child again. He's scrabbling for purchase. “You don’t, at all. I’m always hiding or trying to be someone else. You don’t know me.”

“I do. I saw the letter in your jacket pocket. That night after the party.”

He'd had an envelope addressed to the Washington State Wine and Food tucked in there. He’d been meaning to drop it off at the post office. Negligible. Stupid. 

“Yeah,” he says wildly, “so?”

“So you know how much that means to me, and so do I. And you did it without telling me and without expecting anything in return because that’s who you are. Minghao, I know you. I really do.”

“Please,” is all Minghao can say, reduced to the wordless fear in his chest. “You don’t. Mingyu.”

Mingyu is so close. Minghao can see himself in the soft shiny dark of his eyes again. 

Something in that expression like a lost dog always looking for a home, always looking for scraps. How afraid they both are of what’s inside of them. 

“I do,” Mingyu whispers, the ghost of a smile on his face, his eyes so horribly earnest. Minghao has known him for so, so long. “I know you so well sometimes it feels like I know you better than myself.”

And then the space between them collapses, and his mouth is on Minghao’s and he smells like fresh grass and a clean shower and he tastes like nothing but himself. 

One of his hands rests on Minghao’s cheek feather-light as he angles himself down, deeper into Minghao’s mouth. A wave of fuzzy heat goes through Minghao’s core in slowmotion. Insistent like the pressure against his lips. Something catches and holds him in place. Something makes him push into the dizzy softness. Mingyu sighs into him like he has been waiting for this, waiting for him, waiting for a long time. His other hand cups Minghao’s shoulder, sun-warm. 

Somehow this reminds Minghao of Seokmin. 

Something in his heart curdles. Minghao wrenches himself backward.

“Minghao,” Mingyu says sort of brokenly, his hand still on Minghao’s cheek until Minghao pushes it away.

“You don’t know when to stop, do you,” Minghao grounds out, his mouth buzzing. His heartbeat is thumping in his ears. Mingyu is tracking his face, hovering close again like a lost puppy. Minghao shoves his shoulders and he stumbles backward. “You don’t know how I feel because you’ve never had to be anyone but yourself. Because you know who you are. You always have. And you always get what you want in the end.”

Mingyu is red-eared and crumpled when Minghao stalks past him and it feels like pressing a fist into a bruise. 

It feels like Minghao deserves it.

  
  


_Minghao,_

_I wanted to say_

  
  


The entire way home Minghao’s heart gallops fast as a thoroughbred. Pure luck keeps him from wiping out again as he ricochets past the constellations of people heading out from the game in their small groups. The diner is a swathe of dull white. The hills are swipes of green that blur into the blue sky. 

Even his place of shelter has changed, because somebody is already there, leaning against the glass of the station manager’s booth.

Seokmin looks, from a distance, like something Klimt would paint. Golden and inconceivable. Then he waves and calls Minghao’s name and he’s just Seokmin again. 

Seokmin, Seokmin, Seokmin. Smiling as if he’s trying and failing to hide a secret, hair unruly around his ears from the late morning fog. When he gets close enough to really see Minghao, the smile slips. 

“Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.” 

It comes out ragged. His chest feels like it’s on fire. He kicks his board up, holds its reassuring roughness against his palm, leans it against the wall of the booth. Nothing feels real. He feels unreal.

But Seokmin is more real than ever. Standing in front of Minghao, watching and worrying at the inside of his cheek.

“Do you wanna go for a drive?”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

Seokmin takes a measured exhale, estimating a leap of faith. 

“Don’t say that,” he says. “There’s always somewhere to go.” 

_Minghao,_

_What I mean is_

Seokmin’s old Honda is comforting, somehow familiar in its clutter and old fabric upholstery. Radio turned all the way up, windows rolled down. The spring breeze is warm and welcoming, brings tidings of flowers and fresh earth. There’s a Sky Ferreira song playing. Seokmin keeps his mouth shut tight, stopping himself from singing along.

Minghao stares down at his own hands. Sometimes he studies the trees, his hair fluttering into his eyes.

And once, he looks over at Seokmin. Seokmin seems to instinctively feel his gaze and reciprocates.

For a moment, Minghao lets himself pretend. He lets his heart sing. He looks and looks. Seokmin’s hair, gently billowing around his face as if he’s flying, or underwater. The forest a blur behind him. His face is so sweet and searching. In the sunlight, his eyes glitter like the sea. 

What is he looking at? Can he see who’s really in front of him?

Can anyone?

Minghao turns to stare out the window again, at the billowing curtain of a cloud obscuring half the sky.

Seokmin needs to know. It’s gone on long enough. 

Minghao will tell him.

Minghao will say: “Seokmin, I’m a liar.”

Then: “Seokmin, I was pretending to be Mingyu, but all Mingyu had to be was himself, and that was good enough for you.”

And: “Seokmin, am I good enough? Am I good? Just me? Just me?”

_Minghao,_

_The whole time I was only trying to tell you_

  
  


The Honda comes to a slow halt at the side of the road. He follows Seokmin outside and into the tree cover. No trail. 

He doesn’t ask where they’re going. Branches criss-cross up above and form new shapes of light on the mossy forest floor. It's quiet, quiet enough that he can hear his own breathing and Seokmin's, too, from where he is slightly ahead, hands tucked into the pockets of his shorts. The blue-green stripes of his sweater are rumpled like ocean waves. 

Minghao thinks about just looking at the back of Seokmin’s neck forever and ever. He could live with the dark blue feeling inside of him, spreading like a bruise. He could survive it, but he could never be fully satisfied with it.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? 

“Here it is.”

They’ve come to a clearing. A hot spring nestles between curtains of trees like a jade-colored pearl, the steam rising heavy and thick. Something from a different world. 

“How’d you find this place,” Minghao asks, hushed in genuine awe.

Seokmin’s response is: “Squahamish isn’t all bad.”

He pulls his sweater over his head, drapes it over a branch. Then he slides into the water, his big white shirt turning translucent where it sticks to his shoulders and his chest.

“Are you just gonna stand there?”

Minghao tears his eyes away to extricate himself from his denim jacket. He forgets, momentarily, that all he has underneath is a black shirt he’d snipped the sleeves off from in ninth grade in order to motivate himself to work on his arms. Once this is realized, it’s a little too late. He hugs himself tight and steps forward, delicately sinks down low until the water is lapping at his chin.

“You came in with your jeans on,” Seokmin deadpans.

“Yeah. Some of us don’t wear teeny tiny shorts all the time, you know.”

Seokmin laughs and suddenly splashes close. Minghao backs up quick against a rock.

“Are you going to tell me why you had that face on? Especially after the surprisingly great game and all?” Seokmin’s smiling mouth is very, very close. There’s a mole on his left cheek.

“What face?”

Seokmin narrows his eyes. “Oh- _kay._ I get it, I get it. I’ll have to wheedle it out of you.”

“No, it’s just that I…I’m sorry.” 

Why are things always so difficult? Why does every word feel like scaling a hill? 

Seokmin wavers nearby for a few more seconds, never looking away. As if he is trying to understand a sculpture in a glass display case.

“Minghao,” he says eventually, his tone terribly gentle. “Don’t take it so seriously.” 

Oh, but I do, Minghao thinks. But I always will.

And then, miraculously, Seokmin gets it. Even without any words. 

“It’s okay," he says, offering a smile and tilting his head. The mesh of sun through leaves plays across his nose like freckles made of light. "I understand.”

Then he smiles, and straightens up and falls backward into the water, foregoing all the principles of gravity to float suspended.

Ripples echo outward from him in lazy circles. His hair halos around his face. Minghao watches for a minute, wondering what’s stopping himself from joining in.

They’re here. They’re alone. He tries his very best to mute the thoughts until the sound of water is all he knows.

He takes a breath and turns around to face the rock. Then he pushes himself backward into the blue-green with both hands. Bubbles rush against his ears and the side of his jaw, then trickle away into nothingness. The water quietens as his body finds its natural place in it. The semicircle of sky spreads out infinitely above, and the trees fill the space beneath, three tiny birds pinwheeling amongst them. 

Minghao is rocked gently back and forth. He feels rather than sees Seokmin floating nearby like a reflection of him. Doubles upon doubles. Mirrored in each other and in the water. 

If gravity is matter’s response to loneliness, then for this brief moment Minghao and Seokmin are exempt from it together.

“Are you and Mingyu on a break?” Minghao asks minutes later, his voice feeling and sounding removed from his body. 

“Not really. I don’t know. It got complicated, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Um, hard to know.”

They fall silent for a few seconds. Then Seokmin says, “I’m going to NYU.”

Minghao inhales through his nose, inaudible under the water lapping against the banks and their bodies. 

“Congratulations. That must be— well. You know.”

“Terrifying! Yeah. I’m leaving early, the beginning of summer. I have to take this pre-college class since I’m failing Calc.”

“That’s shit.”

“It’s not too bad. I’ll survive. What about you?”

What about him?

Minghao tries to conjure the words. He’s always had a contentious relationship with letting himself come clean. 

When he was young, sometimes he’d stop talking for the length of an afternoon, chewing instead on the tough meat of feelings he couldn’t quite put words to. Times like that, his father used to tell him to look up. Look up and remind yourself that the world is there. It will always be there. You’ll still find the sky.

Maybe that was why he’d looked up at that painting of the field and had known on instinct what he was supposed to take from it. Maybe this is why now it feels like he can finally tell Seokmin the truth. Here in the water staring up at the evergreens reaching up, forever trying and failing to touch what remains unknown.

“I moved here when I was five, and I’ve never lived anywhere else since. My mother crossed an ocean to get here, and I figured anything else I could do would fall short besides go and live on the moon. So I used to think I might as well stay here, try my best to pay for the love.”

“What do you think now, then?” 

Seokmin asks things so directly. He isn’t like Minghao, who steps around it, or Mingyu, who approaches it sideways. He stares right into the glare.

And Minghao is finally willing to join him.

“I don’t know anymore.” 

Here are the things that Minghao does know— the things that don’t matter at all. 

How Seokmin is only utterly silent in truest concentration. How he repeats their theater director’s every other sentence just to make sure that he’s listening. How he puts his hand on his chest when he sings, anchoring his voice to himself. 

Or how sometimes Mingyu leaves his sentences hanging because he knows he can’t always get his whole point across. How despite this he often says things like a torrential downpour, trying and trying. How when he’s frustrated or disappointed he purses his mouth and twists it to the left. 

How when the two of them are together, even then, Minghao can imagine a place for himself. If not in the booth between them then at least across the table. Hanging onto their words. He could listen, at least. He could listen with infinite care. 

But he knows, by now, that he doesn’t only want to listen. He wants to be in between them. He wants them to listen to him and stare at him and see him, and most of all, he wants them to want him. 

So what’s the meaning in that? 

“I think you kind of _do_ know, though,” Seokmin says, so strangely perceptive. 

Okay. Work up to it. “You're right. The thing is, I applied to Tisch, and I got in, but now I can’t figure out if I should go.”

“Oh, it took me a while to decide, too. I didn’t even tell my mom I got in at first.”

“Really? You said you got rejected?”

“No, I said nothing came in the mail, but the truth came out pretty quick. You know, I used to be embarrassed about it, but I think my best quality is that I can’t lie. Not really.”

From the start, Minghao has seen some of these real pieces of Seokmin. Now they're fitting into place, creating something that is somehow exactly what he first saw, and also so, so much more. “I know.”

“I don’t want to live my life pretending that it’s someone else’s.”

“You never do, Seokmin. I don’t think you can. You’re always yourself.”

Minghao hears a loud splash and is buffeted outwards abruptly. He scrambles, finds his feet beneath him in the slippery bank. When he manages to stand he finds that Seokmin is upright, too, inches away, water trickling down his face and his neck. 

“We have to get out of here, Minghao,” Seokmin says, suddenly forceful. “We have to go out into the world. _You_ have to go out into the world. You’re so much more. You have so much more inside of you.” 

He throws his arms out to the sides, like, Here Minghao is. What do you think about that, world? Look at him. 

Look at him! 

He is so achingly cracked open that the boundaries and lines of Minghao’s mouth and his heart and his brain get all scrambled and he says, “Seokmin, I really need to tell you something.”

Seokmin’s hands splash back down into the water unceremoniously, his chest rising and falling. 

“Okay. Me too.”

Minghao knows he looks desperate because he can hear his own breathing coming shallow, but for once, he can’t seem to give a shit. “No, I need to tell you this now. Because— because I’ve lost a friend over it, or maybe something more. And I knew from the start this would happen, so this is me. Being honest.”

“About what?”

Minghao doesn’t know how he feels. He feels numb. Like he’s been pushed out into a spotlight with no preparation. A bad dream. 

But he closes his eyes and opens his mouth, anyways. That’s what it’s about. That’s what it’s all been about the whole time.

“The love letters from Mingyu. The whole start of your relationship. It was me. I wrote those letters. I’m sorry.”

“Mingyu already told me.”

He opens his eyes.

Seokmin isn’t stepping away with disgust or scrambling away from the water. He’s not turning his back. He’s just standing there dripping wet and shivering, looking like he might disintegrate into tears.

Sorry sorry sorry, Minghao thinks, God, I’m so sorry and I’m a horrible person and I’ll just disappear and you and Mingyu will never have to see me ever again, and he opens his mouth to say all this and more when Seokmin clears his throat.

“I’ve been trying to write you a love letter,” Seokmin says mournfully. 

“What?”

“I mean, really, by hand and everything, but it keeps going wrong. There are so many things I want to tell you, and none of them seem to come out right.”

“A love letter,” Minghao echoes, numb. “To me?”

Seokmin laughs wetly. His mouth works, tries to come up with the words. He shakes his head when nothing arrives, droplets flying from his hair. Then he turns tail and begins wading towards the shore. 

“Yes, to you!” he calls over his shoulder. “To who else?”

Minghao scrambles after him out of the water, up the bank. He grabs his jacket and shoves his feet half into his shoes and follows Seokmin over the uneven forest floor with his heart pounding damn near out of his throat.

“Seokmin, wait. Seokmin. What’s that supposed to mean? You can’t just say things like that.”

“It means that you’re this— you’re you, and I’m me, and I just. I don’t think— Well, I never thought that was good enough. I mean next to you.” Seokmin’s talking as if he’s keeping the end of the world at bay, doesn’t even register the noise Minghao makes. Just keeps going. “You’re so— you always know what to say, and when you look at me you’re really looking at me. And I just— sometimes life is something to get through. Sometimes being a person is something to get through. It’s so weird and hard and scary sometimes but when I’m around you and Mingyu I forget about that, and it just feels okay and good to want whatever I want and— I’m sorry. I’m making no fucking sense.”

He comes to a stop a few feet away with his eyes closed, looking perfectly miserable in the sunlight through the trees. 

“Seokmin.”

“You use words like they’re precious,” he says slowly, like it’s painful. “I waste them. I forget their, you know…” 

“Their weight,” Minghao finishes. 

Seokmin nods, opens his eyes. His expression does a strange and tender thing that almost makes Minghao sad. 

“Why do you look so surprised?”

“Because.” 

Minghao stumbles on his own words. He has to look away from Seokmin and out at the trees and their utter stillness to say what he means. 

“Because I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect any of it. I don’t know how long I’ve felt this way about both of you, but I can’t even… I can’t even say it to you. I can’t even say it to Mingyu. I rarely say anything the way that I really want to.”

“Minghao, it’s us. It’s me. I don’t say _anything_ how I want to. Even realizing what I wanted took me so long. Realizing that I could remember what your laugh sounded like for hours afterward, or— or that you were trying to show me all the ways you say what you can’t say out loud, or— I think I always knew somewhere deep inside of me that those letters came from you. You know?”

“I didn’t,” Minghao breathes. A litany of utter truth. An acceptance of himself. Of the fact that he has been falling down for a long, long time. “I didn’t.” 

“The problem with me is that I’m scared,” Seokmin says, his voice revealing how close he is to tears. His hands curl into fists at his sides. “Maybe if I could've said something earlier. But I’m not a brave person.”

Minghao starts to think, as always. 

Thinks: We’re all fucking terrified. 

Thinks, too, of all the things he has in his head. How could any of them possibly sum up to the inconceivable things in his heart? How can he speak, how can he say anything at all, how can he, how can he, how can he… 

He remembers something, and it comes to him in Mingyu’s voice. 

It’s about effort, Minghao. Duh. Remember? 

Of course you do, you just pretend you don’t because you’re scared. But guess fucking what? It’s about jumping without looking.

Minghao stops his mind. He reaches out and presses his palm flat against Seokmin’s chest, against the hummingbird of his pulse. 

“Seokmin, listen to me.” He leans forward, searching those dark eyes so full of honesty and fear and love. “Stop worrying. You’re a good person. You’re the best person I know.”

“Minghao,” Seokmin says jaggedly. 

His eyes are going glossy the way they seem to do whenever anyone is truly kind to him. He is always so close to brimming over, but it takes the right person and the right words. 

And of course Minghao has the right words. Of course Minghao is the right person. Seokmin gives into the overflow, wincing against the tears, still trying to say what he means. 

“So are you," he says softly, wonderingly. "You are good. You have to know that. You have to know you’re good. Tell me you know.”

Minghao steps forward until their noses brush, his fingers curling into the fabric of Seokmin’s damp shirt. They’re both shivering in the residual cold of the water, Minghao even in his jacket, and it’s like he has been trying and trying to read a sentence and someone takes the book away from him and says, Look up. 

It’s right in front of you. It’s all been in front of you this whole time.

Minghao’s mouth is lifting in a helpless smile. Seokmin cups his face, palms sun-warm against the curves of his cheeks. Steadying the words to come, giving them an open easy target.

“I am good,” Minghao whispers. 

He doesn’t have to be, but he is all the same. Isn’t that incredible? It is. He is. He leans his forehead against Seokmin’s, repeats the words against his warm mouth saltwater with tears, against his grateful laugh. How could you not love that laugh? How could you not love him, love the way he sees you and everything else in the world? “I am good.”

The birds are singing when Seokmin kisses him for real. The birds are the only sound in the whole world. Seokmin’s hands move from Minghao's face to wrap carefully around his body, and Minghao lets himself be dipped backward into empty space, grabs onto Seokmin’s neck for dear life, pulls himself as close as he possibly can, finally finally finally.

When they break away Seokmin’s flushed eyes are wide above him. “Well!” he says, almost comically startled. 

“Well,” Minghao says, smiling so hard it hurts. They have become characters in a book or a movie or a musical. It’s ridiculous, and because of that Minghao wants it forever. He wants sentiment, he wants embarrassment, he wants dreams, wants to feel the flush spreading feverish and red on his neck, wants love letters and Seokmin, and he wants Mingyu, too. He wants all of it.

“Of course it never really felt right. Me and Mingyu. I mean, without you.”

“I’ll talk to him, then. Then I’ll try.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I won’t. I should get you home. We’re gonna catch colds.”

But neither of them move. The birdsong is wild and wonderful. Seokmin keeps studying Minghao’s face beneath him, holding him like they’re at the end of a performance and all the audience is on their feet. His eyes alive, tears drying shimmering, a dimple deepening under his mouth in utter delight at what he has found. 

He rights Minghao gently and presses their foreheads together again. Their noses bump. It’s like they’re one person. They stay like that together for a few more seconds. 

  
  
  


There’s a tupperware of soondubu jjigae on the kitchen counter with a post-it note stuck to the lid. 

_Hi Minghao._

_First of all I’m sorry. We should’ve talked before whatever happened happened._

_Today made me realize that I really miss that. I mean, talking to you._

_Also I miss you looking at me with a lot of concern when I shovel too much food into my mouth, and how you stop and take pictures when you really want to remember something. And the way you always seem to know how I’m feeling and what to say._

_You really, really get me. You make me want to be a better person._

_I’ve been telling you all this stuff about effort but I realized sometimes I have to take a step back. I can’t always keep pushing._

_I don’t know any poems by heart except for this one, and it’s in Korean. But this is my favorite part of it in English:_

_Chew on your feelings that are cornered_

_Like you would chew on rice._

_Anyway, life is something that you need to digest._

  
  


A doodle of a smiley face grins up at him below the words. Minghao’s mother says from over near the window where she’s working at something on the counter, “Your friend is in your room.”

His heart starts its fluttering. A bird beating against a cage. 

“Okay,” he says, pressing the post-it-note into his jacket pocket. “Okay.”

He walks down the hall to the loft ladder. When he clambers up he’s expecting to see Mingyu at the top, tense and expectant. 

Instead, he finds Junhui. Hands in his pockets, studying the cross-stitched mountain inside its embroidery hoop with the air of someone much older and wiser than a high school student.

“You fled pretty quick from that locker room,” Junhui says without turning around. “I was outside and I saw. Wanted to stop by and check up on you.”

“What’re you, my doctor,” Minghao says, but it falls flat.

Junhui looks over his shoulder for a long time. Must be taking stock of what he finds. A tall boy who will always be a little bit lonely, barefoot in his childhood bedroom, jeans still damp at the threadbare cuffs, hair half-covering his quiet eyes. 

“Do you remember how we became friends, Xiao Hao Hao?”

Minghao nods, wordless.

“It was like raising a cat.” Junhui smiles out of the side of his mouth. “I always liked a challenge. The more you ignored me, the more I’d poke. Sometimes in class I’d talk to you in Mandarin. You were in that stupid ESL thing they made you take and you were always upset about accidentally mixing your words up.”

“I remember that.” Back then Minghao couldn’t help but feel a desperate anger at the newfound disconnect between his own heart and his mouth. A link he hadn’t known could feel so capricious and lost all of a sudden.

“But then,” Junhui says, “one day I guess you noticed I was happiest when you responded however you wanted. And you stopped caring so much about how you came across. You were just you, and that was enough for both of us.”

Minghao understands. 

He walks over and opens his curtain. They stand side by side as they have for years, looking out at the world together. 

“Whatever it is, I know you’ll make the right decisions,” Junhui tells him. “Your heart is strong, Minghao. You’re stronger than anyone I know. You won’t just weather it. You’ll find your way.”

  
  
  


After Junhui leaves, Minghao discovers that his mother has been working to form a literal mountain.

“That,” he says, “is a lot of dumplings.”

She doesn’t look up from her folding and pinching. “I’m practicing. End of summer, I’ll have to make you eighteen meals, six days. From here to New York.”

She keeps pinching the dumplings, mindless of the way Minghao is staring at her.

“I’ve seen the acceptance letter. Why couldn’t you tell me?”

She waits for him, stops in her motions. She rests her hands flat on the counter. Her forehead is uncreased.

He tells her.

“Because it feels like I’ve just been surviving. But I’m so scared to let you go. I don’t want to leave you behind, even though I know I have to, or else I’ll never really feel like myself.”

The TV is off in the living room. Grey and still. The life they have gathered together is within them, not within this house.

Minghao murmurs, “Do you know what I mean?”

His mother, five thousand miles from where she began, takes his hands in hers. 

“I know. I know better than anyone else.”

“I have to leave, Ma.”

“I know. I know.” 

She pulls Minghao towards her and he folds into something smaller and becomes a child again. Five years old in a new country he wants no part of, seven years old looking up at a painting, fourteen years old at his father’s funeral, eighteen years old tearing up in his mother’s arms. 

The day he’s learned that he will always be her child is the day he’s learned that he is ready to let her go.

“You don’t need to try to be anyone else, my lovely stupid child,” his mother says into his hair. “Just you is enough.”

She rocks him back and forth. He keeps his eyes open and stares at the blur of the faded yellow curtains, the dusty ceramic vases on the sill, the kitschy seventies patterned wallpaper his father loved so much. His mother used to complain about it, but it’s still here. It’ll always be here. Even when Minghao is gone.

His mother wipes the damp from his eyes with her thumbs, and Minghao steps away. They finish making their dumplings in the sunlight.

  
  


Seokmin finds out from certain sources (Seungkwan via Suhyun via Soonyoung, the nexus of all the good gossip) that Mingyu is attending prom. Minghao readjusts his phone against his shoulder and frowns. 

“Alone?” 

“I guess he’s going with friends or something?”

Mingyu hasn’t made much notable appearance outside the restaurant in the last twenty-four hours. Hasn’t responded to the one text Minghao sent him either. 

Maybe that can be overlooked, since the text had only said, _prom?_ Although it’s also true that coming from Minghao, anything that ends in a question mark might be slated as desperate. 

But he figures Mingyu is doing what he said on his note. 

“Okay. Then let’s go get him. I’ll see you in an hour?” 

At around six, a look out the window reveals Wonwoo, Soonyoung, Vivi, and Haseul gathering by the trees behind Mingyu’s house. They’re wearing sets of matching coupley outfits and everything— Wonwoo and Soonyoung in black and white, Vivi and Haseul coordinating in dark red. Mingyu is taking pictures of them on a big DSLR that is definitely someone else’s, concentrated and quiet, making an art out of it. 

He doesn’t laugh much. Only gives the perfunctory smile, his eyes lonely even from far away.

He’s wearing a tuxedo. Doing the whole prom thing right, then. He looks nearly perfect, but when he turns a certain way it’s evident half of his bowtie has come loose and is sitting up against the back of his neck instead of on his slightly rumpled collar. 

Minghao doesn’t have a suit that fits him. Much less a tuxedo. The last time he had to wear something formal was for middle school graduation when he was five inches shorter. And his dad’s old suits, hanging in his mother’s closet, are tight at the elbows.

So instead he puts on the nicest things he owns: a really preppy cable knit sweater and a turtleneck. Jeans will have to do. He brings his board with him and leaves out the back, calls goodbye to his mother taking up the night shift in the station manager’s office.

Out by the tracks Seokmin’s in Converse and jeans, too, but he has a nice jacket on top at least. He opens his arms for a hug, always yearning. Minghao capitulates and scrunches his face when Seokmin tries to land one on him. 

“Hey, hey,” he laughs, dodging Seokmin’s mouth. “My mom’s, like, right there.”

Seokmin goes into a pout so Minghao sighs and lets him peck his cheek.

“Fine. Happy?”

“Extremely!”

“Yeah? What’s with the outfit?”

“Oh, you’re one to talk. You look like an art student from the seventies.” Seokmin dodges his halfhearted shove, giggling. They start to walk out towards the flat pavement of the street. “I actually do have a tux that fits, but it’s pinstripes. I stole it from the Chicago musical last semester.”

“It’s okay. You still look pretty.”

“Yeah? Is your heart all aflutter?”

Minghao rolls his eyes but doesn’t deny it. He stops by the street, steps close to brush Seokmin’s bangs off his face. They’ve both gone disheveled in their enthusiasm. 

“Didn’t you do your hair?” he murmurs. Seokmin shakes his head. “Stay still.” He starts to flush, holds his breath until Minghao’s done. 

“There.” Minghao grins. “Pretty.”

“I’m not used to you being so— ah, whatever.” Seokmin fans at his own face, laughing. “So are you. You always are. Anyways, anyways. How are we doing this?”

“Okay, here’s the plan. I’ll be on the board near the front, get a start. Then you’ll run up behind me. Jump up with your right foot here, against the tail. Yeah?”

“Um, right.” Seokmin starts to look nervous. “My feet are kinda bigger than yours, though. My other foot—”

“Just put it right next to the first one. Or slightly in front of it. You’ll be fine!”

“Right. Okay.” Seokmin nods once. “Let’s go!”

Minghao gets his start. Then Seokmin leaps up from behind and almost wipes them both out. The skateboard jerks up like a balance beam and Minghao’s arms pinwheel and Seokmin screeches something unintelligible and grabs onto his shoulders for dear life. But perhaps the God of skateboards or maybe Tony Hawk himself has Minghao in his good books because the board rights itself somehow, and then they’re on their way. 

They build speed together like Minghao never has been able to before alone. The entire ride up the hill contracts to the scent of Seokmin’s cologne and his hands resting on Minghao’s shoulders and the thought of who they are skating towards. Nothing else Minghao even knows for these few minutes but Seokmin, Mingyu, himself, Seokmin, Mingyu, himself. 

Squahamish High is cheap, so prom is in the gym. Neither of them bought tickets. 

Technically their grand plan, then, is to crash the biggest party of the year. Only problem is that when they get there they discover that goddamn Chan Lee has preemptively blocked the gym entrance with a series of revolving bored teachers. 

They wait in the student parking lot outside for a change in the guard, Minghao pushing the board back and forth against the pavement. The double doors swing open after a few minutes to admit some latecomers. 

They catch sight of Chan directing a teacher to righten a drooping banner. Seokmin waves wildly, and when this doesn’t work he does what certainly will: cups his hands around his mouth and hollers, _“Channie!”_

Chan looks over along with about a fourth of the gym as the doors start to swing shut again. Minghao flushes down to his ankles, doesn’t have time to really be embarrassed because Chan is headed over, formally irritated but informally interested. 

The doors close behind him, cutting the bright lights off. The night is indigo and cloud-cover makes the moon hazy. It’s cold, even in May. 

“Don’t call me Channie,” he says, wrapping his arms around himself in the chill. 

“We need you to do a really, really important favor. Can you find Mingyu and ask him to meet us outside? If you do that for us, we’ll—we’ll…”

“We’ll give you all our old class notes from the last two years,” Minghao finishes triumphantly. 

“What’s this for?”

“Oh come on.”

Minghao tries to appeal to his softer nature. “Hey. Who used to help you clean the mirrors? The parts you couldn’t reach? Who taught you to teach the little kids the right way?”

“I mean, you. But then you stopped coming into studio.” But Chan’s already started to look kind of agreeable. 

“I’ll come back. At least once before I leave for college.” 

Minghao has decided he’s leaving early with Seokmin. That gives him two weeks to make good on his promise.

Chan, ever-intuitive, catches on, raises his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah?” 

“Swear on my life.”

He considers. He must find some genuine honesty in Minghao, because he grins. 

“Let me see what I can do.” 

They’re playing Heart of Glass when the doors open again a few minutes later. Seokmin tugs on Minghao’s arm as if he hasn’t already noticed Mingyu near the entrance, glittering in the disco lights. 

Mingyu’s tux is still pressed clean. He looks dressed to weather any sort of adversity. All sharp at the edges. Sharp in the face, too. That tautness in his mouth and eyes, distinct even from afar. 

The double doors close behind him slowly. The music becomes canned. 

“Hey,” he says, coming to a stop a few feet away. His face is angular in the shadows of the parking lot. Belied by his voice, soft like it’s never been before. 

Mingyu has suddenly learned to mute himself. Minghao wants to apologize for it so fucking desperately. But instead he waits. Just how Mingyu has been waiting and waiting for him.

Mingyu’s eyes flit to Seokmin then back to Minghao. Seokmin says absolutely nothing.

And then Minghao comes to the understanding that they are both looking to him. 

Waiting for him to make sense of it. He is still their bridge, their center from the start. 

At this realization, he feels so much inside that it’s almost overwhelming. Terror, apprehension, hope, lapping against him, flooding him near into overflow. But at least he's full. 

Until a few months ago Minghao used to be unafraid of a kind of emptiness inside of him. He figured it was symptomatic of the life he was born into. He thought he was born into weathering it. He hadn’t realized, then, that thinking like that signified something about his nature. That it wasn’t indicative of a failure to live up to the things around him, but rather a failure to listen to himself.

He listens now. His own quick breaths. His heart like a drum. On it goes, on it goes. 

How curious, the human heart. The fact of it. How much crushing weight it can withstand. How much fullness it can hold. How much it wants you to just fucking sing, how much it jostles up against your ribcage and presses up on your sternum when you look at the people you love, makes your voice wobbly with the truth. 

Tells you, It’s okay. Some shit, you just need to let go of.

“All I do is think,” Minghao says. “I’m tired of it. I’m tired of trying to say things the right way and trying to be someone I’m not. All I do is think about you. That has to mean something, and I know—” 

His mother in his head: Just you is good enough. Junhui. You’ll find your way. Mingyu, his eyes the same as that worried elementary school kid— Minghao, I know you. And Seokmin, the most honest person he knows. You are good. 

“I know I love you both,” Minghao says in words that are his and only his. “That’s all. Can you forgive me?”

The song fades in his ears. Mingyu exhales for all three of them. 

“Do you mean that?”

“I do.” He says it, and it’s a fact. Minghao is eighteen, he lives in Squahamish, he has his whole fucking life ahead of him, and he loves Seokmin and Mingyu. “I mean it.”

“Then there’s nothing to forgive,” Mingyu says, looking like he is understanding the words as he says them. A smile is growing on his face.

They inhale, and the music comes flooding back into the world, and then staying away from each other is an impossibility. 

Mingyu and Seokmin fall into place around Minghao like the gravity holding them apart has suddenly collapsed, like a wire has been cut, like their three bodies are one and have always been one. Seokmin holds Mingyu is holding Minghao is being held by both of them at once, and Minghao starts to laugh, squeezes his eyes shut hard enough to see stars. 

“I missed you so, so much,” he says, desperate with incredible, earthshattering relief. This is where he belongs. This is where he has always belonged. He understands, he understands everything. 

Mingyu asks, muffled against Seokmin’s shoulder and the top of Minghao’s head, “Do you both wanna get out of here? I have my pickup, I’ll drive us. We can get Jeonghan to sneak us alcohol or something and then we can hang out in my room all night and—”

“No shit,” Minghao says. “Let’s go.” 

But before they do, he steps away briefly out of their all-encompassing warmth and reaches up to fix Mingyu’s bowtie. 

  
  


Mingyu tells his parents that he wants to go to culinary school. 

They don’t exactly take it the best way, but they sit down with him and try to understand. He’s taking a gap year before applying. He has two more weeks left with Seokmin and Minghao. 

They’re leaving for New York before the summer can even really become summer, but they make the most of it. Every day feels brand new. In fact, strangely, Squahamish itself feels brand new. The old sign at its limits becomes an ironic footnote. Fuck, shit, maybe it really _is_ happening in Squahamish. Minghao has only become privy to that information at the end of his long stay, but he does what he always does and tries not to let it go to waste. 

He decides to embark on a project with Seokmin and Mingyu. Through Mingyu’s Minolta, they renew their town. The three of them take turns with the camera and Mingyu gets the pictures developed at the art store near the end of their second week. They rifle through them together in Minghao’s kitchen, Seokmin’s hands all floury from the pizza dough he’s miserably failing at making.

Minghao steals some of his favorites: Mingyu in red, framed by the night sky, making sweater-pawed peace signs from the passenger seat of his pickup. (From that one day he asked Seokmin to drive them to the hot spring in the woods so he could see it for himself. He kept pretending he was a DMV instructor the whole way, criticizing Seokmin’s steady-acceleration skills over Girls’ Generation on the aux. The three of them made out in the water for awhile, slow and careful explorations. But then Mingyu realized he had a bunch of angry voicemails from his mom saying that technically he was on the clock so please come back home and help us out, you're still living under our roof, Mingyu Kim.)

Seokmin in Minghao’s living room, head tucked into the crook of Mingyu’s neck. (Both Mingyu and Minghao had furiously insisted he needed to watch The Shape of Water like right now, it’ll blow your mind how have you never seen it before. Mingyu coerced him by making extra fancy popcorn with a secret ingredient. Seokmin gave the movie a fair shot, but he fell asleep halfway through once he finished the popcorn.)

Minghao outside the restaurant at night, grinning at Seokmin, whose face is being enthusiastically licked by Mingyu’s tiny white mutt. (Who, as Minghao has finally discovered, is named Bobpul.) Minghao striking a pose with Chan and Soonyoung early one morning in the studio, the wooden floor pale pink from the sunset. Seokmin in his green and blue sweater outside the Squahamish High tennis courts at dawn. Mingyu sitting in a shopping cart they found somewhere down on the tracks, beaming in the sunrise. Minghao outside of the diner on Main Street in his long plaid shirt, eyes closed, silhouetted golden by the evening light.

Then there's a photo Minghao’s mother took that came out really good, out on their yellow porch. Mingyu and Seokmin are trying to act natural by looking off in opposite directions. But Minghao is grinning right at the camera, giving up all pretense. 

He looks so, so happy in it. He keeps all of the photos for his dorm room at NYU except that one. That one, he decides to give to his mother. 

The few days they have are trickling away from between their fingers. But as his train out of Squahamish approaches nearer hour by hour, Minghao starts to realize the thing inside of him, feathered with a fast little heartbeat, growing by the second, isn’t quite apprehension. Something a lot softer, brighter.

He isn’t sure when the future became something to look forward to instead of something to dread. He tries to tell Mingyu and Seokmin about this. He tells them almost everything these days, although he isn’t used to it. He feels so, so light, like he might float away towards the moon. 

“That’s a good feeling, isn’t it,” Seokmin says, muffled. He’s curled up on his side on Mingyu’s bed. His face is pressed into Minghao’s shoulder, giving easy access so Minghao can run his fingers through his hair. “It’s nice to feel that way. Like it’s okay to float even if you don’t know where you’ll end up.”

“Yeah. Unless you accidentally get in the way of Seokmin’s fucking dart set,” Mingyu puts in from the other side of Minghao. Well technically sort of from under Minghao, whose head is resting half on his chest while he sits up against the headboard, one socked foot hanging off the covers. His bed isn’t quite made for three, but they make it work. 

“Hey, you’re the one who bet me fifty dollars I couldn’t hit a moving target,” Seokmin points out. Minghao can feel him smiling.

“That was like half my salary from one whole day,” Mingyu whines. “Plus now I have a bruise on my arm. Look.” He points it out to Minghao. Naturally things had ended in typical slapstick fashion. 

Seokmin’s head pops up from under Minghao’s hand like a prairie dog. “Oh, don’t even try your puppy dog shit. Minghao, you were there! Tell him for real, if he’d just been able to move a little faster—”

“Have you _seen_ me run? Didn’t you see me run towards that goal? I was like Messi himself.”

“You didn’t even score it, Hansol scored it.” 

“He only scored it because of my endless generosity.”

“Yeah but no one puts assists in the Squahamish Town Crier, do they?”

“I resent that! And besides—” 

Minghao clears his throat 

“You two are seriously…” 

“Yes? Us two are seriously what?”

“Us two are seriously the loves of your life?”

“You two are seriously _idiots,_ " Minghao says, and yelps and scrunches his eyes shut when they both attempt to smack wet kisses on his face. 

  
  


He stays up painting his parting gift two nights before their time is up. Stage manager Jihoon lets him take his 10x10 backdrop home. Mingyu carts it back in the pickup for him, helps lay it out on the front porch.

Minghao spends the midnight hours adding stars falling downward, raining silver light on the dark blue sky. Raining on his head, shoulders, heart. He doesn’t have to explain what it means. They understand.

It hangs on the wall of Mingyu’s parents’ restaurant big and bold when they all have dinner together the night before he and Seokmin are set to leave. Minghao's mother joins them. He hopes, ardently, that she is starting to make Squahamish into some kind of home. Maybe a shitty one, but a home nonetheless.

Afterward, the three of them sit out back on the patio step. The stars are so clear. They’re surrounded by proof of life— the occasional owl, crickets chirping quietly. Even the orange buzz of Mingyu’s patio heater.

They don't talk about leaving. They talk about what they're going to do over winter break. Go ice skating together. Bake too many cookies. Make out after a snowball fight. Warm each other up.

Minghao's feeling isn't small anymore. It's growing and growing with every time Seokmin kisses the corner of his mouth, every time Mingyu laces his fingers into theirs like they have always been meant to be intertwined in some way.

But Mingyu is sitting slightly at a remove from them, now. He kissed Minghao after dinner when they weren't even halfway outside, super fucking reckless, like if he didn't do it he'd never get to do it again. He tasted like bingsu and he licked the inside of Minghao's mouth in quiet desperation, and when Minghao stepped away for air he went really silent, breathing hard with a closed mouth, his eyes wide.

All three of them know what he's thinking. Seokmin scoots toward him and wraps an arm around his shoulders. 

“Who am I going to eat with when the two of you are gone,” Mingyu says softly, flopping his head sideways into the crook of Seokmin's neck. But he’s staring off at the trees, his eyes glittering.

Seokmin tries to lighten the mood. “Hey, you still have your family, don’t you? And Bobpul? Don't forget Bobpul.”

"Can't forget Bobpul," Mingyu says, sort of sniffling.

"Oh, hey," Seokmin says, going quiet, like he's just caught onto how close Mingyu is to tears. "Silly. Don't be so sad. What are you so sad for?"

Mingyu exhales, slow. 

“I guess I just— I really just wish we’d done more things together, you know? I wish we took a trip somewhere far away, just the three of us, to— to the ocean or something, and then we could—”

He breaks off. He doesn’t want them to hear him cry. Now Seokmin looks despondent, too.

Minghao feels that enormous thing inside him again. Not quite sadness. But almost.

He stands abruptly and tugs Mingyu and Seokmin up by their hands. “Look up,” he says, tilting his face up at the sky and its stars. “Whenever you feel bad, look up. Remember how it feels. There’s nothing to regret yet. We have all the time in the world.”

Seokmin is staring at him like he's something immeasurable. Mingyu’s eyebrows are drawn together, but not in concern. 

“When did you get so goddamn optimistic?”

“Guess.” 

He squeezes their hands when he is finally granted with smiles.

  
  
  


Junhui comes to say goodbye first, arrives in Minghao’s bedroom with a letter. He doesn’t want to send Minghao off at the railroads. 

“Goodbyes shouldn’t be drawn out,” he says. He holds something out. When Minghao only looks at him he explains, “I wrote you a letter.”

“Oh,” Minghao says. His chest feels like a crumpled piece of soggy tissue paper. “Junhui. Don’t do that.”

“I’m speaking your language now.” Junhui grins wide to hide the bittersweet in his face. But that only ends up leaking some of it, and he flaps at his eyes and laughs all watery.

“Don’t cry. Dumbass.” 

Of course only because Minghao’s feeling susceptible now, too. He’s remembering that one time in fourth grade when Junhui found him crying into his pillow at the once-a-month sleepover they were allowed. Junhui asked him what was wrong and Minghao couldn’t really say, could only whisper, “I just feel like I’m missing something, I’m missing something really really big from inside of me all the time.” 

So Junhui tried to hug him and when that didn’t work he made endless terrible dad jokes and by dawn they hadn’t slept a wink but both of them were almost crying from laughter and Junhui said Minghao was going to be stuck with him forever and ever.

Now when Junhui pulls Minghao into a hug, it’s to bring himself some comfort. 

Minghao is not the kid he once was. Neither of them are. When Junhui holds him, he holds Junhui back. 

Into his ear Junhui tells him something that means Be good, be strong, now.

“You too, Xiao Hui Hui,” he whispers. “I’m stuck with you forever, remember? I’ll see you over break.”

He saves the letter for later. He’ll open it when he gets to college. When he’s ready for the rest of the world. 

It’s a part of the long, long process of discovering when to hold onto things, and when to let go, and how. It’s oblique and difficult and something he can only get through like a kid, feeling his way in the dark, bumping into shit and making stupid mistakes. 

There’s a certain way a child learns to be sad. By finding his mother’s old textbooks out of reach on the shelf, shellacked with dust. By failing to break her out from behind her glass.

But it’s also the way he learns to be happy again: by making a fool of himself. By banging against the window mistaking it for the sky until it shatters, until he realizes it’s not his fault and never was. By allowing himself to be seen when he has no words and also when he has too many. Until, once again, he is only himself, himself, himself.

His mother is at the front door. Like Junhui, she’s a believer in short goodbyes. 

“Think about Casablanca. The best parts,” she explained to him once, “are always after the big goodbye scene.” 

Of course, she’s probably right. 

She hands him the food they made together and holds him by his shoulders. They've spent the nights poring over job applications, and the other day, she went out and fixed the semaphore. She's changing, too.

“Make sure to eat well. And be a little foolish,” she tells him. “You can be clever and not-clever at the same time, you know. It’s a bit like falling in love. Let your heart be soft, and want what you want. Sometimes it can lead to good things.”

“I’ll miss you. I’ll miss so much.”

“You don’t need to.” She tucks his hair behind his ears and touches his brow, calls him her stupid child forever, and leaving for college won’t change any of that, will it. It’s all okay. It’s all going to be okay.

Seokmin’s parents drop him off a few minutes later, and Minghao can tell he’s been crying because his smile is too big and his nose and cheeks are pink. They walk over to the restaurant together and wait outside. May is sunny, feels like it’s more sky than trees. Endless blue, light and unburdened with clouds. 

Mingyu jogs out as soon as he sees them, his apron still on. He’s carrying two whole plastic bags of food. 

They collapse into one big silent hug for a long time. Mingyu refuses to tear up. 

“Remember when you get back we’re taking a trip to Marymere Falls,” he says eventually. “And after that we have to go to the Palouse.”

Minghao steps to the side while Mingyu says goodbye to Seokmin, whispers something secret, kisses him. Minghao watches, his wide and shimmering not-sadness spreading to his fingertips and toes and becoming even bigger, even more unbearably bright. 

When they break away, Seokmin keeps one palm curved around Mingyu’s jaw like he’s trying to keep hold of a very precious thing. But he lets go. Has to, in the end. 

Minghao knows holding something flush against himself makes Mingyu feel safe, so he tucks himself small when he’s hugged. Lets Mingyu wrap an arm gently around the back of his neck and press him close for a long, long time, until they can hear the steady chugging of the train approaching from the green.

“Take care of my mom while I’m gone, will you?”

Mingyu rests his chin on top of Minghao’s head. Minghao can hear him breathing, slightly shaky.

“I dunno if you noticed,” Mingyu says, watery despite himself, “but your mom’s a stone-cold badass. I’m pretty sure she could survive the apocalypse on her own.”

“I love you,” Minghao says, closing his eyes against the rumble of Mingyu saying it back. “Until later, then.”

He tries to leave for the train, but Mingyu doesn’t let go. Their hands are suspended between them, fingers interlaced, like a string drawing tight. 

Mingyu doesn’t say anything but everything he feels is clear in his face. His shiny eyes, his downturned mouth. Minghao wants to kiss him so badly.

Instead he says, gently chastising, “Hey. Don’t. You big baby.”

Mingyu shakes his head. “It’s just— you used to make me so sad. And now—”

He breaks off.

“And now?”

“I don’t know. I’m just proud of you,” Mingyu says. 

He tries, bravely, to smile. He looks so beautiful.

The train whistle is shattering. Birds flee from the trees, startled. Last call to board.

“We’ll meet again,” Minghao promises. “In no time.”

“I know. I know.”

Minghao can’t help it. He leans forward and kisses Mingyu, gentle as he can, once on his lips. Once, standing on his very tip-toes, on his forehead. Like a blessing. 

Be well, be brave. Be foolish.

Seokmin starts to cry for real after they board, although he pretends he’s having an allergic reaction. “Spring always does this to me,” he claims, letting Minghao dab at his eyes with a piece of Kleenex from his to-go pack. They sit side-by-side instead of across from each other. Later, lulled by the road, Seokmin will lean his head on Minghao’s shoulder and tell him what Mingyu said to him. But now all he can do is sniffle softly and look absolutely heartbroken.

They begin to move out of the platform slowly, overcoming long-held inertia. From his seat, Minghao can see the station managers’ office. Its glass looks opaque. A sheath of dullness.

He is so glad to leave it behind, but now he can understand how important it was to be within its walls those four years. Stepping out of it made the air that much sharper, the colors that much brighter. The feelings that much more unfathomable and bottomless. Nothing goes to waste.

They start to pick up speed. At first, the only view out to Squahamish is the trees, same as ever. But Minghao's heart is in his ears, thumping away. He finds the feeling, the all-encompassing feeling, and tries to name it as it washes over him. It's bright goldenrod, something like hope, and it's nearly unbearable, and when Minghao hears someone yelling from outside it digs its claws into his chest and he jerks his glance down to the tracks, the familiar tracks of his town.

And there is Mingyu. Sprinting alongside the train, waving up at them just like the protagonist of a horrible cheesy romcom, hollering loud enough to be heard through the window. 

“Seokmin! Look! What the fuck!”

Seokmin’s eyes widen as he leans forward, and when he catches sight of Mingyu he splits into the biggest smile. All of his sadness simply evaporates.

They scramble down the corridor and out to the narrow space between the cars. The people inside the windows are looking out at them in delighted bewilderment. The wind sings in Minghao’s ears and blows his hair half into his face and Mingyu runs and runs, his face elated and alive, and Minghao is the one to reach his hand out first, and Seokmin follows suit, shaking with laughter.

Mingyu’s hand brushes theirs. And then the train picks up speed, and he falls behind but keeps running anyways, and that is their last view of him. Until they meet again.

The night of prom, when they were rolling down the hill in Mingyu’s pickup, Minghao clambered up to a standing position in the bed and announced, “I’d like to say something.”

Seokmin sat up on his knees next to him and clapped. Demanding attention from the universe. Minghao is speaking! Everyone, quiet! 

“I guess it’s a toast,” Minghao explained. “Or a benediction.”

“Okay. We're listening.”

“Say whatever you want,” Mingyu called from the front, through the emptied out rear panel where there once had been a window. “Go!”

“Seokmin, Mingyu,” Minghao began hesitantly, looking out to where the bottom of the hill was fast approaching, “wherever you go, I hope you carry this place with you. May you always remember how it felt to be here.”

His voice was soft under the wind whistling and the up-down of the road. But anyways maybe all the great people had no idea what the fuck they were doing when they started. Maybe it took them time to find out. Maybe it had always been about the scrabble against gravity towards the top of the hill, and about knowing how to fall back down again. 

Minghao thought of Van Gogh looking out of his window. He thought of himself looking out of his window. Of the people he loved, and of the people who loved him. How terrifying and wonderful it could all feel.

“But when the bird takes flight, may it be fearless,” Minghao said to the sky, feeling like he had grown wings, feeling his voice rise above the three of them. “If our words are heavy in our hearts, may we let them go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to k who listened to me ramble when i was afraid, and thank you to you, reader, for reading this. i love you, i love you!
> 
> i wrote an extended author's note for this story [here](https://surjamukhi.dreamwidth.org/3268.html), in case you're interested in some of the writing process and my own thoughts on the characters and story!
> 
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sunsburst) or[ curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/sunsburst) <3


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